基于检索的开放式评估在哪里失败?从长篇医学答案事实性验证中自动归纳分类体系
Where Does Retrieval-Based Open-Ended Evaluation Fail? Automatic Taxonomy Induction from Long-Form Medical Answer Factuality Verification
Heyuan Huang, Jirui Dai, Alexandra DeLucia, Sonal Joshi, Mahsa Yarmohammadi, Jie Gao, Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez, Mark Dredze
AI 速读 基于摘要
作者针对开放式医学答案的检索式事实性验证,构建两套失败分类体系,并用自动模式归纳与压力测试揭示检索与验证环节的系统性失败模式。
cs.CL · cs.IR
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Retrieval-based factuality evaluation, where LLM-generated claims are verified against evidence from authoritative medical corpora, has become the dominant paradigm for scalable hallucination detection in high-stakes clinical settings. Despite the urgency of reliable and transparent medical fact verification, most systems measure performance with aggregate metrics like F1, which obscure where and why failures occur. Existing RAG diagnostics require gold answers or annotated gold evidence, neither of which exists in this regime. We introduce two comprehensive taxonomies, grounded in a case study on the open-ended MedExpert dataset and 3 closed-ended datasets, decomposing failures into retrieval-stage errors along five quality dimensions, and verifier-reasoning errors into six consecutive steps. We adapt an automatic pattern induction pipeline using LLM-as-Judge to label evidence quality and classify verifier reasoning errors at scale, and then stress-test our findings across 4 retrieval methods and 6 frontier verifier models. Our analysis reveals that scaling model size, adding reasoning effort, expanding to authoritative web sources, and applying medical fine-tuning do not resolve these failure modes, demonstrating that they represent fundamental limitations of the retrieve-then-verify paradigm in open-ended medical settings rather than artifacts of outdated systems. We release our code and data at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Medical_RAG_eval-4AB5 for the full reproducibility of our results.