Can large language models reason about medical questions?
Open accessAbstract
Although large language models often produce impressive outputs, it remains unclear how they perform in real-world scenarios requiring strong reasoning skills and expert domain knowledge. We set out to investigate whether closed- and open-source models (GPT-3.5, Llama 2, etc.) can be applied to answer and reason about difficult real-world-based questions. We focus on three popular medical benchmarks (MedQA-US Medical Licensing Examination [USMLE], MedMCQA, and PubMedQA) and multiple prompting scenarios: chain of thought (CoT; think step by step), few shot, and retrieval augmentation. Based on an expert annotation of the generated CoTs, we found that InstructGPT can often read, reason, and recall expert knowledge. Last, by leveraging advances in prompt engineering (few-shot and ensemble methods), we demonstrated that GPT-3.5 not only yields calibrated predictive distributions but also reaches the passing score on three datasets: MedQA-USMLE (60.2%), MedMCQA (62.7%), and PubMedQA (78.2%). Open-source models are closing the gap: Llama 2 70B also passed the MedQA-USMLE with 62.5% accuracy.
Verified 2026-10-07 · 1 reference not checked yet
AI snapshot
Written from the paper’s full text.
TL;DR
This paper evaluates whether GPT-3.5 and open-source LLMs can answer and reason about medical questions across MedQA-USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA using prompting, chain-of-thought (CoT), retrieval augmentation, and ensembling. It finds that LLMs can often reason and recall expert knowledge, and that Codex 5-shot CoT with many samples reaches passing scores on all three benchmarks.
Key findings
- Zero-shot InstructGPT outperformed the best fine-tuned BERT baselines on all three datasets: +1.4% on USMLE, +1.0% on MedMCQA, and +1.1% on PubMedQA.
- Expert annotation of 50 USMLE CoTs found that incorrect answers often contained reasoning errors (86%), insufficient/incorrect knowledge (74%), and reading-comprehension failures (50%); still, 59% of CoTs leading to incorrect answers contained at least one correct reasoning step and 65% showed correct knowledge recall.
- Codex 5-shot CoT with an ensemble of up to k=100 samples reached passing scores: USMLE 60.2%, MedMCQA 62.7%, and PubMedQA 78.2%; Llama 2 70B also passed USMLE with 62.5% accuracy.
- Codex 5-shot CoT and Llama 2 were close to well calibrated, though calibration was worse for PubMedQA; prompting also induced answer-position biases, with direct prompting overestimating C/D and underestimating A, and CoT prompting underestimating B/C while overestimating D.
Methods
- The study used three medical multiple-choice QA datasets: MedQA-USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA, with questions and reference explanations used for few-shot CoT prompts.
- Models included closed-source GPT-3.5 series (InstructGPT, text-davinci-002; Codex, code-davinci-002) and open-source models from 7B to 70B parameters, including Llama 2, Vicuna, Guanaco, Falcon, MPT, and GPT-NeoX.
- Prompting conditions included zero-shot direct, zero-shot CoT with domain-specific cues, few-shot direct/CoT, BM25 retrieval augmentation over Wikipedia, and ensemble/self-consistency sampling up to k=100 completions; a medical expert annotated 50 generated CoTs using six success/failure patterns.
Limitations
- The paper states that deploying LLMs in clinical scenarios requires more robust techniques, that it exposed only one form of bias (answer-option ordering), and that many more biases may exist, including hidden training-data biases such as gender and race.
- The paper notes that benchmark contamination in training sets is a valid concern for both proprietary and open-source LLMs, and that a large gap remains between the models and human experts despite passing scores.
- Evident from the text: the expert CoT evaluation is based on a subset of only 50 USMLE CoTs annotated by one medical expert, and the BM25 retrieval experiment is described as limited.
Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.
Integrity signals
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Cites
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Claims the paper makes
0 of 19 cited sources checked · 0 supported · 0 flagged
- Findingown data
When using the direct prompt, BM25 grounding improved MedMCQA accuracy by +2.7%.
“When using the direct prompt, we recorded gains on the USMLE (+1.3%) and on the MedMCQA (+2.7%) datasets, suggesting that retrieval augmentation might be beneficial.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
The smaller model text-curie-002 delivered close to random performances on USMLE, with a maximum accuracy of 27.9%.
“The smaller model text-curie-002 delivered close to random performances, with a maximum accuracy of 27.9%.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Without BM25 grounding, InstructGPT outperformed the best BERT methods on MedMCQA by +1.0%.
“Without BM25 grounding, InstructGPT scored +1.4% on the USMLE questions, +1.0% on the MedMCQA exam questions, and +1.1% on PubMedQA over the best BERT methods.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Domain-specific CoT prompts #2-#5 did not significantly outperform the original CoT prompt #1.
“Nonetheless, the domain-specific CoT prompts #2–#5 did not significantly outperform the original CoT prompt #1.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Among questions answered incorrectly, 86% of generated CoTs contained reasoning errors (pattern D).
“We found that most of the questions answered incorrectly triggered generating CoTs that contained reasoning errors (pattern D, 86%) and that exhibited a lack of knowledge (pattern E, 74%).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: A single medical expert’s annotation is sufficient to evaluate the quality of generated CoTs.
- Rests on an assumption: The generated CoTs reflect the model’s reasoning process.
- Findingown data
The best performance on MedMCQA was 48.8% validation accuracy, obtained by combining retrieval-augmented prompts.
“The best performances on the USMLE and MedMCQA datasets were obtained by combining retrieval-augmented prompts and setting a maximum of 53.1% accuracy on the USMLE dataset and 48.8% validation accuracy on the MedMCQA dataset.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
47% of CoTs leading to incorrect answers were inconclusive, meaning the model could not narrow down the prediction to a single answer.
“Furthermore, inspecting the CoTs leading to incorrect answers more closely, we found that 47% of those were inconclusive: the model could not narrow down the prediction to a single answer.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim- Rests on an assumption: A single medical expert’s annotation is sufficient to evaluate the quality of generated CoTs.
- Rests on an assumption: The generated CoTs reflect the model’s reasoning process.
- Findingown data
Llama 2 70B passed the MedQA-USMLE with 62.5% accuracy.
“Open-source models are closing the gap: Llama 2 70B also passed the MedQA-USMLE with 62.5% accuracy.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
The code-pre-trained and human-aligned InstructGPT scored 47.1% on USMLE.
“The non-aligned largest GPT-3 text-davinci-001 scored 40.2%, whereas the largest code pre-trained Codex scored 52.9%, and the code-pre-trained and human-aligned InstructGPT scored 47.1%.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
The largest code pre-trained Codex scored 52.9% on USMLE.
“The non-aligned largest GPT-3 text-davinci-001 scored 40.2%, whereas the largest code pre-trained Codex scored 52.9%, and the code-pre-trained and human-aligned InstructGPT scored 47.1%.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Findingcitation
MedQA-USMLE questions are more challenging than MMLU-USMLE questions.
“Furthermore, we compare the MedQA-USMLE with the MMLU-USMLE dataset in supplemental information section D; we found the MedQA questions to be more challenging than the MMLU ones.31”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [31] Hendrycks, 2020, Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- Findingown data
Without BM25 grounding, InstructGPT outperformed the best BERT methods on PubMedQA by +1.1%.
“Without BM25 grounding, InstructGPT scored +1.4% on the USMLE questions, +1.0% on the MedMCQA exam questions, and +1.1% on PubMedQA over the best BERT methods.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
65% of CoTs leading to incorrect answers showed proper recall of knowledge.
“We observed that CoTs leading to questions answered correctly could still show failure patterns but we also observed that the CoTs leading to incorrect answers were not entirely incorrect, as 59% contained at least one correct reasoning step and 65% showed proper recall of knowledge.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim- Rests on an assumption: A single medical expert’s annotation is sufficient to evaluate the quality of generated CoTs.
- Rests on an assumption: The generated CoTs reflect the model’s reasoning process.
- Findingown data
Without BM25 grounding, InstructGPT outperformed the best BERT methods on USMLE by +1.4%.
“Without BM25 grounding, InstructGPT scored +1.4% on the USMLE questions, +1.0% on the MedMCQA exam questions, and +1.1% on PubMedQA over the best BERT methods.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Among questions answered incorrectly, 50% of generated CoTs showed misunderstanding of the questions or the context (pattern F).
“Misunderstanding of the questions or the context was less frequently observed (pattern F, 50%).”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim- Rests on an assumption: A single medical expert’s annotation is sufficient to evaluate the quality of generated CoTs.
- Rests on an assumption: The generated CoTs reflect the model’s reasoning process.
- Findingown data
Without BM25 grounding, the direct prompt remained on average a better alternative to the CoT prompts.
“Without BM25 grounding, the direct prompt remained, on average, a better alternative to the CoT prompts.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
When using the direct prompt, BM25 grounding improved USMLE accuracy by +1.3%.
“When using the direct prompt, we recorded gains on the USMLE (+1.3%) and on the MedMCQA (+2.7%) datasets, suggesting that retrieval augmentation might be beneficial.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
The best performance on USMLE was 53.1% accuracy, obtained by combining retrieval-augmented prompts.
“The best performances on the USMLE and MedMCQA datasets were obtained by combining retrieval-augmented prompts and setting a maximum of 53.1% accuracy on the USMLE dataset and 48.8% validation accuracy on the MedMCQA dataset.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Among questions answered incorrectly, 74% of generated CoTs exhibited a lack of knowledge (pattern E).
“We found that most of the questions answered incorrectly triggered generating CoTs that contained reasoning errors (pattern D, 86%) and that exhibited a lack of knowledge (pattern E, 74%).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: A single medical expert’s annotation is sufficient to evaluate the quality of generated CoTs.
- Rests on an assumption: The generated CoTs reflect the model’s reasoning process.
- Findingown data
59% of CoTs leading to incorrect answers contained at least one correct reasoning step.
“We observed that CoTs leading to questions answered correctly could still show failure patterns but we also observed that the CoTs leading to incorrect answers were not entirely incorrect, as 59% contained at least one correct reasoning step and 65% showed proper recall of knowledge.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim- Rests on an assumption: A single medical expert’s annotation is sufficient to evaluate the quality of generated CoTs.
- Rests on an assumption: The generated CoTs reflect the model’s reasoning process.
- Findingown data
The non-aligned largest GPT-3 text-davinci-001 scored 40.2% on USMLE.
“The non-aligned largest GPT-3 text-davinci-001 scored 40.2%, whereas the largest code pre-trained Codex scored 52.9%, and the code-pre-trained and human-aligned InstructGPT scored 47.1%.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingnone given
Llama 2 outperformed Codex by 2 points on the USMLE in spite of a much smaller parameter footprint.
“Llama 2 outperformed Codex by 2 points on the USMLE in spite of a much smaller parameter footprint.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Instruction-fine-tuned LLMs like Guanaco and Vicuna performed exceptionally well.
“Instruction-fine-tuned LLMs like Guanaco and Vicuna performed exceptionally well (Figure 8).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingnone given
Llama 2 outperforms Codex with just half the parameters.
“For instance, Llama 2 outperforms Codex with just half the parameters.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Findingown data
Codex 5-shot CoT with an ensemble of k samples reaches the passing score on the PubMedQA dataset (78.2% ≥ 78%).
“Using an ensemble of the k samples, Codex 5-shot CoT reaches the passing score on the three tasks (see Table 1): the USMLE dataset (60.2% ≥ 60%), the MedMCQA dataset (62.7% ≥ 50%), and the PubMedQA dataset (78.2% ≥ 78%).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The chosen passing-score thresholds (60% for USMLE, 50% for MedMCQA, 78% for PubMedQA) are appropriate for defining passing.
- Findingown data
Codex and Llama 2 are close to well calibrated.
“We found Codex and Llama 2 to be close to well calibrated, corroborating the results that “language models (mostly) know what they know.”61”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [61] Kadavath, 2022, Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- Findingown data
In the case of the USMLE and the MedMCQA datasets, the retrieval-augmented BERT baselines were outperformed by several LLMs, regardless of augmenting the prompts with Wikipedia passages.
“In the case of the USMLE and the MedMCQA datasets, the retrieval-augmented BERT baselines were outperformed by several LLMs, regardless of augmenting the prompts with Wikipedia passages.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA datasets are valid benchmarks for medical reasoning ability.
- Findingown data
Zero-shot InstructGPT and Codex outperformed fine-tuned BERT models on three challenging question-answering datasets.
“Zero-shot InstructGPT and Codex outperformed fine-tuned BERT models on three challenging question-answering datasets (see zero-shot benchmark and supplemental information section A).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA datasets are valid benchmarks for medical reasoning ability.
- Findingown data
A large gap remains between our models and the human experts.
“In the section scaling inference-time compute with Codex, we showed that sampling and combining up to k=100 completions using Codex or Llama 2 with 5-shot CoT prompts was sufficient to pass both the MedMCQA and the challenging USMLE, although a large gap remains between our models and the human experts.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The human baseline performances reported are valid lower bounds for human performance.
- Findingreasoning
In the case of the direct prompt, answer D was most often selected.
“In the case of the direct prompt, answer D was most often selected, which might be due to its proximity to the generated answer.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Findingown data
Ordering of the answer options affects the predictions.
“We exposed one form of bias (ordering of the answer options affects the predictions), but many more might affect predictions, including those hidden in the training data (e.g., gender, race, …).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Codex yields feeble performances with zero-shot CoT.
“Although Codex performed exceptionally well with 5 shots, Codex yield feeble performances with zero-shot CoT; inspecting the generated CoTs revealed lesser-quality samples (supplemental information section I).”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Findingown data
Codex performed exceptionally well with 5 shots.
“Although Codex performed exceptionally well with 5 shots, Codex yield feeble performances with zero-shot CoT; inspecting the generated CoTs revealed lesser-quality samples (supplemental information section I).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Scaling inference-time compute by sampling many CoTs per question could overcome part of these limitations.
“Although InstructGPT and Codex still make mistakes, we found that scaling inference-time compute by sampling many CoTs per question could overcome part of these limitations.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Sampling and combining up to k=100 completions using Codex or Llama 2 with 5-shot CoT prompts was sufficient to pass both the MedMCQA and the challenging USMLE.
“In the section scaling inference-time compute with Codex, we showed that sampling and combining up to k=100 completions using Codex or Llama 2 with 5-shot CoT prompts was sufficient to pass both the MedMCQA and the challenging USMLE, although a large gap remains between our models and the human experts.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The chosen passing-score thresholds (60% for USMLE, 50% for MedMCQA, 78% for PubMedQA) are appropriate for defining passing.
- Rests on an assumption: The human baseline performances reported are valid lower bounds for human performance.
- Findingreasoning
In the case of the CoT prompts, labels A and D were selected more often.
“In the case of the CoT prompts, labels A and D were selected more often, which might be a result of often beginning CoTs with content related to option A.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Findingcitation
Vicuna 1.5 13B outperformed both Llama 2 versions.
“Surprisingly, Vicuna 1.5 13B’s superior performance to both Llama 2 versions underscores the significance of high-quality datasets for instruction-based fine-tuning.62”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Our expert evaluation revealed that CoTs are often sound.
“Our expert evaluation (see expert evaluation of the generated CoTs) revealed that CoTs are often sound: even though InstructGPT still does make mistakes, it was often able to reason, recall medical knowledge, and comprehend the given problem.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The expert evaluation of CoTs is a valid measure of soundness and interpretability.
- Findingown data
Augmenting the prompt with factual data improves performances.
“Nevertheless, a lack of knowledge might be more easily compensated; our experiment with BM25, albeit limited, suggests that augmenting the prompt with factual data improves performances.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
5-shot prompting allowed us to bypass the zero-shot limitations of Codex.
“Nevertheless, 5-shot prompting allowed us to bypass the zero-shot limitations of Codex.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
The base version of Llama-2 70b outperformed the chat version.
“We observed a similar pattern when comparing the versions of LLama-2 70b: the base version outperformed the chat version (supplemental information section H).”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Findingown data
Codex (without alignment) was not as robust as InstructGPT (with alignment) in zero-shot CoT setting.
“Codex (without alignment) was not as robust as InstructGPT (with alignment) in zero-shot CoT setting (see performances in Table S2 in supplemental information section A and see CoT samples in supplemental information section I).”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Findingown data
Codex 5-shot CoT with an ensemble of k samples reaches the passing score on the MedMCQA dataset (62.7% ≥ 50%).
“Using an ensemble of the k samples, Codex 5-shot CoT reaches the passing score on the three tasks (see Table 1): the USMLE dataset (60.2% ≥ 60%), the MedMCQA dataset (62.7% ≥ 50%), and the PubMedQA dataset (78.2% ≥ 78%).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The chosen passing-score thresholds (60% for USMLE, 50% for MedMCQA, 78% for PubMedQA) are appropriate for defining passing.
- Findingown data
Llama 2 70B outperforms Codex 175B (proprietary).
“Llama 2 70B outperforms Codex 175B (proprietary).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Despite the simplicity of the BM25 retriever and the small number of retrieved documents prepended in each prompt, grounding InstructGPT resulted in slight improvements.
“Nevertheless, despite the simplicity of the BM25 retriever and the small number of retrieved documents prepended in each prompt, grounding InstructGPT resulted in slight improvements (see Table 4).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingnone given
Zero-shot InstructGPT significantly outperformed the fine-tuned BERT baselines.
“Zero-shot InstructGPT significantly outperformed the fine-tuned BERT baselines.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA datasets are valid benchmarks for medical reasoning ability.
- Findingown data
Increasing the budget of samples yields better results.
“Increasing the budget of samples yields better results.42”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Codex 5-shot CoT with an ensemble of k samples reaches the passing score on the USMLE dataset (60.2% ≥ 60%).
“Using an ensemble of the k samples, Codex 5-shot CoT reaches the passing score on the three tasks (see Table 1): the USMLE dataset (60.2% ≥ 60%), the MedMCQA dataset (62.7% ≥ 50%), and the PubMedQA dataset (78.2% ≥ 78%).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The chosen passing-score thresholds (60% for USMLE, 50% for MedMCQA, 78% for PubMedQA) are appropriate for defining passing.
- Findingown data
For both InstructGPT and Codex, single-sample CoT prompting was not found to be competitive with direct prompting.
“For both InstructGPT and Codex, single-sample CoT prompting was not found to be competitive with direct prompting (see zero-shot benchmark and supplemental information section A).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Interpretationown data
Retrieval augmentation might be beneficial for medical question answering.
“When using the direct prompt, we recorded gains on the USMLE (+1.3%) and on the MedMCQA (+2.7%) datasets, suggesting that retrieval augmentation might be beneficial.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Interpretationown data
Our exploration into open-source LLMs indicated their competitive stance in medical benchmarks.
“Our exploration into open-source LLMs indicated their competitive stance in medical benchmarks.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Interpretationown data
Open-source models, despite having fewer parameters, are approaching the performance of proprietary ones.
“Open-source models, despite having fewer parameters, are approaching the performance of proprietary ones (Figures 7 and 8).”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Interpretationown data
LLMs, without fine-tuning, can mobilize medical knowledge and problem-solving skills.
“This suggests that LLMs, without fine-tuning, can mobilize medical knowledge and problem-solving skills.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA datasets are valid benchmarks for medical reasoning ability.
- Interpretationown data
GPT-3.5 memorizes domain knowledge.
“The expert evaluation of the generated CoTs (see expert evaluation of the generated CoTs) and the good results obtained on the medical exam questions (see Table S2; supplemental information section A) suggest that GPT-3.5 memorizes domain knowledge.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The expert evaluation of CoTs is a valid measure of soundness and interpretability.
- Interpretationown data
InstructGPT is not omniscient.
“This suggests that InstructGPT is not omniscient, and so (1) using stronger retrievers such as commercial search engines or dense retrievers,49 (2) using a more complete knowledge base,48 or (3) leveraging inference-time compute by retrieving, reranking, and processing more passages49 might improve performances.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Interpretationcitation
High-quality datasets are significant for instruction-based fine-tuning.
“Surprisingly, Vicuna 1.5 13B’s superior performance to both Llama 2 versions underscores the significance of high-quality datasets for instruction-based fine-tuning.62”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [62] Zhou, 2023, LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- May combine two claims. 20
- The quote only partly states this claim. 2
- Classified as probably not a substantial claim. 10
May combine two claims. The quote only partly states this claim.
Findingown dataGPT-3.5/Codex 5-shot CoT reaches passing scores on MedQA-USMLE (60.2%), MedMCQA (62.7%), and PubMedQA (78.2%).
“Last, by leveraging advances in prompt engineering (few-shot and ensemble methods), we demonstrated that GPT-3.5 not only yields calibrated predictive distributions but also reaches the passing score on three datasets: MedQA-USMLE (60.2%), MedMCQA (62.7%), and PubMedQA (78.2%).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataDirect prompting led to overestimating labels C and D while underestimating label A.
“Direct prompting led to overestimating labels C and D while underestimating label A.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataPerformances were lower for each considered CoT cue except on USMLE, where half of the CoT prompts resulted in small improvements over the direct prompt (+1.1% using CoT prompt #1 vs. using the direct prompt).
“Performances were lower for each of the considered CoT cues, except in the case of the USMLE dataset, for which half of the CoT prompts resulted in small improvements over the direct prompt (+1.1% using CoT prompt #1 vs. using the direct prompt).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimThe quote only partly states this claim.
Findingown dataGPT-3.5/Codex 5-shot CoT yields calibrated predictive distributions.
“Last, by leveraging advances in prompt engineering (few-shot and ensemble methods), we demonstrated that GPT-3.5 not only yields calibrated predictive distributions but also reaches the passing score on three datasets: MedQA-USMLE (60.2%), MedMCQA (62.7%), and PubMedQA (78.2%).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataCombining the predictions of multiple prompts outperformed single-prompt predictions, except on PubMedQA, where the direct prompt performed exceptionally well.
“Combining the predictions of multiple prompts outperformed the single-prompt predictions, except in the case of the PubMedQA dataset, for which the direct prompt performed exceptionally well.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataBoth direct and CoT prompting schemes led to biased predictive frequencies on USMLE.
“Both prompting schemes led to biased predictive frequencies.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataInstructGPT can often read, reason, and recall/exploit expert knowledge.
“Based on an expert annotation of the generated CoTs, we found that InstructGPT can often read, reason, and recall expert knowledge.”
- Also stated in: § Contributions · plain
“A medical expert annotated a subset of CoTs generated by zero-shot InstructGPT and supports that InstructGPT, in many cases, can reason and exploit memorized expert knowledge.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: A single medical expert’s annotation is sufficient to evaluate the quality of generated CoTs.
- Rests on an assumption: The generated CoTs reflect the model’s reasoning process.
- Also stated in: § Contributions · plain
May combine two claims.
Findingown dataCoT prompting led to underestimating labels B and C while overestimating label D.
“CoT prompting led to underestimating B and C while overestimating label D.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataInstructGPT was often able to reason, recall medical knowledge, and comprehend the given problem.
“Our expert evaluation (see expert evaluation of the generated CoTs) revealed that CoTs are often sound: even though InstructGPT still does make mistakes, it was often able to reason, recall medical knowledge, and comprehend the given problem.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The expert evaluation of CoTs is a valid measure of soundness and interpretability.
May combine two claims.
Findingown dataBest performances are obtained using Codex, outperforming the human-aligned InstructGPT, which is a fine-tuned version of Codex.
“Best performances are obtained using Codex, outperforming the human-aligned InstructGPT, which is a fine-tuned version of Codex.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataWith 100 samples, Codex 5-shot CoT delivered unprecedented performances on the three datasets, bridging the gap with human-level performances and virtually passing the USMLE by 0.2% points.
“With 100 samples, Codex 5-shot CoT delivered unprecedented performances on the three datasets, bridging the gap with human-level performances and virtually passing the USMLE by 0.2% points.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA datasets are valid benchmarks for medical reasoning ability.
- Rests on an assumption: The chosen passing-score thresholds (60% for USMLE, 50% for MedMCQA, 78% for PubMedQA) are appropriate for defining passing.
- Rests on an assumption: The human baseline performances reported are valid lower bounds for human performance.
Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).
Findingown dataInspecting the generated CoTs revealed lesser-quality samples.
“Although Codex performed exceptionally well with 5 shots, Codex yield feeble performances with zero-shot CoT; inspecting the generated CoTs revealed lesser-quality samples (supplemental information section I).”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataAlthough such prompts, taken separately, did not outperform the original zero-shot CoT prompt, more specific prompts appeared to trigger alternative strategies such as working by elimination or manipulating equations.
“Although such prompts, taken separately, did not outperform the original zero-shot CoT prompt (see Table S2 in supplemental information section A), more specific prompts appeared to trigger alternative strategies such as working by elimination or manipulating equations (see supplemental information sections B and I).”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataCodex 5-shot CoT appears to be overall calibrated, although the calibration is worse for the PubMedQA dataset.
“Codex 5-shot CoT appears to be overall calibrated, although the calibration is worse for the PubMedQA dataset.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimClassified as probably not a substantial claim.
PremisecitationConditioning predictions on a knowledge base is an alternative research direction for improving language models.
“Conditioning the predictions on a knowledge base is an alternative research direction for improving language models.47,48,49”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 3 sources checked- cites [47] Lewis, 2020, Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive nlp tasks, Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst.
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [48] Borgeaud, 2022, Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens, PMLR
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [49] Lazaridou, 2022, Internet-augmented language models through few-shot prompting for open-domain question answering, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
Classified as probably not a substantial claim.
PremisecitationMedQA-USMLE enables assessing LLM capabilities in realistic clinical scenarios requiring specialized medical knowledge, advanced reasoning, and human-level reading comprehension.
“Specialized datasets such as the MedQA-US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) enable assessing the capabilities of LLMs in realistic clinical scenarios requiring specialized medical knowledge, advanced reasoning capabilities, and human-level reading comprehension skills.32”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [32] Jin, 2021, What disease does this patient have? a large-scale open domain question answering dataset from medical exams, Appl. Sci. source
Not checked in the free run.
Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing). May combine two claims.
PremisecitationCoT prompting led to substantial improvements on many reasoning-intensive tasks, bridging the gap with human-level performances for most hard BIG-bench tasks.
“CoT prompting led to substantial improvements on many reasoning-intensive tasks,20,21,22,23 allowing us to bridge the gap with human-level performances for most of the hard BIG-bench tasks.24”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 5 sources checked- cites [20] Wei, 2022, Chain-of-thought prompting elicits reasoning in large language models, Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst.
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [21] Zhou, 2022, Least-to-most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [22] Drozdov, 2022, Compositional Semantic Parsing with Large Language Models, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [23] Nye, 2021, Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [24] Suzgun, 2022, Challenging BIG-bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-thought Can Solve Them, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
May combine two claims.
Study design and conductown dataThe experiment was repeated using randomly permuted labels, and similar patterns were observed.
“We repeated the experiment using randomly permuted labels and observed similar patterns (see supplemental information section F).”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimProbably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).
PremisecitationZero-shot CoT allows generating CoTs using a single domain-agnostic cue, "Let's think step by step".
“As an alternative to writing reference step-by-step solutions, zero-shot CoT allows for generating CoTs using a single and domain-agnostic cue: “Let’s think step by step”25”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [25] Kojima, 2022, Large language models are zero-shot reasoners, Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst.
Not checked in the free run.
Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).
PremisecitationCombining multiple sampled CoTs (self-consistency) showed improvements over single-sample CoT methods.
“Combining multiple sampled CoTs (also known as self-consistency) has also been explored in past work, and showed improvements over single-sample CoT methods.42,43”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked- cites [42] Wang, 2022, Self-consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [43] Li, 2022, On the Advance of Making Language Models Better Reasoners, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
Classified as probably not a substantial claim.
Study design and conductown dataA subset of 50 CoTs generated based on USMLE questions were annotated by a medical expert using six categories.
“A subset of 50 CoTs generated based on USMLE questions were annotated by a medical expert (C.E.H.) using the six categories.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimProbably not a substantial claim: may not pass S2 (checkable). May combine two claims.
InterpretationreasoningBoth open- and closed-source LLMs hold great potential for assisting human decision-making in medicine and beyond.
“Although benchmark contamination in training sets for both proprietary and open-source LLMs is a valid concern, these results indicate that both open- and closed-source LLMs hold great potential for assisting human decision-making in medicine and beyond.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimMay combine two claims.
PremisecitationBoth GPT-4 and MedPalm 2 have achieved performance on USMLE around 85%.
“Since the completion of v.2 of this work, both GPT-4 and MedPalm 2 have achieved performance on USMLE around 85%.35,63”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked- cites [35] Nori, 2023, Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [63] Singhal, 2023, Towards Expert-level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S2 (checkable), S4 (based). May combine two claims.
InterpretationreasoningCoTs are human readable and therefore interpretable.
“Nevertheless, CoTs are human readable and therefore interpretable.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimMay combine two claims.
Interpretationown dataLLMs can mostly comprehend complex medical questions, can often recall expert-domain knowledge, and can often perform non-trivial reasoning steps.
“Our expert evaluation suggests that LLMs can mostly comprehend complex medical questions, can often recall expert-domain knowledge, and can often perform non-trivial reasoning steps.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: The USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA datasets are valid benchmarks for medical reasoning ability.
- Rests on an assumption: The expert evaluation of CoTs is a valid measure of soundness and interpretability.
Classified as probably not a substantial claim. May combine two claims.
PremisecitationCoTs can be combined and/or filtered using human or automated feedback.
“CoTs can be combined and/or filtered using human or automated feedback.42,60”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 2 sources checked- cites [42] Wang, 2022, Self-consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [60] Cobbe, 2021, Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems, arXiv
Not checked in the free run.
May combine two claims.
InterpretationreasoningCoT prompting proved to be a powerful tool leading to better performances and more interpretable predictions.
“CoT prompting proved to be a powerful tool leading to better performances and more interpretable predictions.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim
The paper relies on this without support.
It was unclear how large language models perform in real-world scenarios requiring strong reasoning skills and expert domain knowledge.
“Although large language models often produce impressive outputs, it remains unclear how they perform in real-world scenarios requiring strong reasoning skills and expert domain knowledge.”
The paper relies on this without support.
At the time of the research, studies applying large language models to the medical domain were still needed.
“At the dawn of this research work, although LLMs had been tested on large benchmarks (MMLU,31 BIG-bench18), studies applied to the medical domain were still needed.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Large language models memorize part of the knowledge embedded into the training data.
“LLMs memorize part of the knowledge embedded into the training data; nonetheless, models might fail to reuse this knowledge effectively during prediction.”
The paper relies on this without support.
A single medical expert’s annotation is sufficient to evaluate the quality of generated CoTs.
“A subset of 50 CoTs generated based on USMLE questions were annotated by a medical expert (C.E.H.) using the six categories.”
The paper relies on this without support.
The generated CoTs reflect the model’s reasoning process.
“The CoTs that result from that prompt not only appear to expose valid reasoning but also translate into superior zero-shot performances (see example in Figure 1).”
The paper relies on this without support.
The USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA datasets are valid benchmarks for medical reasoning ability.
“Zero-shot InstructGPT and Codex outperformed fine-tuned BERT models on three challenging question-answering datasets (see zero-shot benchmark and supplemental information section A).”
The paper relies on this without support.
The chosen passing-score thresholds (60% for USMLE, 50% for MedMCQA, 78% for PubMedQA) are appropriate for defining passing.
“Using an ensemble of the k samples, Codex 5-shot CoT reaches the passing score on the three tasks (see Table 1): the USMLE dataset (60.2% ≥ 60%), the MedMCQA dataset (62.7% ≥ 50%), and the PubMedQA dataset (78.2% ≥ 78%).”
The paper relies on this without support.
The human baseline performances reported are valid lower bounds for human performance.
“We report the best fine-tuned models and the human baseline.”
The paper relies on this without support.
The expert evaluation of CoTs is a valid measure of soundness and interpretability.
“Our expert evaluation (see expert evaluation of the generated CoTs) revealed that CoTs are often sound: even though InstructGPT still does make mistakes, it was often able to reason, recall medical knowledge, and comprehend the given problem.”
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Most published medical AI benchmarks employ enterprise GPUs (NVIDIA A100, H100) or cloud API access, reporting neither hardware specifications nor inference costs.
“Most published medical AI benchmarks employ enterprise GPUs (NVIDIA A100, H100) or cloud API access, reporting neither hardware specifications nor inference costs [2,3,7].”
From Benchmarking Large Language Models for Intensive Care Unit Clinical Decision Support: A Dual Safety Evaluation of 26 Models on Consumer Hardware (2026) · cites this paper as [7]
The Experiments section reports that this study used 2,000 NVIDIA A100 GPU hours to benchmark open-source models and used the Codex beta program for other experiments. It does not establish that most published medical AI benchmarks use enterprise GPUs or cloud APIs, or that they omit hardware specifications and inference costs. In fact, it names its own GPU hardware. (LLM, conf=0.82)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredExtensive prior work has benchmarked LLMs against medical board exams and sophisticated research-based questions.
“Extensive prior work has focused on advanced medical question answering, in which LLMs are benchmarked against medical board exams and sophisticated research-based questions13–17.”
From Large language models provide unsafe answers to patient-posed medical questions (2026) · cites this paper as [14]
LLMs have surpassed the average human score on the USMLE, rising from 38.1% in September 2021 to 90.2% in November 2023, where the human passing score is 60% and human expert score is 87%.
“LLMs have quickly surpassed the average human score on the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) in a short amount of time, from 38.1% in September 20212 to 90.2% in November 20233 (human passing score is 60%, human expert score is 87%4).”
From AgentClinic: a multimodal benchmark for tool-using clinical AI agents (2026) · cites this paper as [4]
Prior benchmarks of LLMs in medicine have primarily focused on knowledge assessment (USMLE examinations, medical licensing questions) or general reasoning capabilities.
“Prior benchmarks of LLMs in medicine have primarily focused on knowledge assessment (USMLE examinations, medical licensing questions) [6,7] or general reasoning capabilities [2].”
From Benchmarking Large Language Models for Intensive Care Unit Clinical Decision Support: A Dual Safety Evaluation of 26 Models on Consumer Hardware (2026) · cites this paper as [7]
Errors leading to incorrect recommendations by the large language model were classified using a prior evaluation framework into 4 error types: incorrect reading comprehension, incorrect recall of knowledge, incorrect reasoning step, and not enough information.
“Finally, we classified the errors leading to incorrect recommendations by the LLM, leveraging a prior evaluation framework [29]. We classified each error as 1 of 4 error types: incorrect reading comprehension, incorrect recall of knowledge, incorrect reasoning step, and not enough information, as described in Table 1.”
From Identifying Deprescribing Opportunities With Large Language Models in Older Adults: Retrospective Cohort Study (2025) · cites this paper as [29]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.
Conflicting Codex MedMCQA accuracy
MajorThe abstract and results text report 62.7% MedMCQA accuracy for Codex 5-shot CoT, but Table 1 reports 59.7% for the same model and dataset.
“the MedMCQA dataset (62.7% ≥ 50%)”
“| Codex 5-shot CoTa | 2022 | 60.2 | 59.7 | 78.2 |”
PubMedQA passing score claimed despite none being listed
MinorThe text says Codex reached the passing score on PubMedQA by exceeding 78%, but Table 1 lists no PubMedQA passing score. It identifies 78% as the human expert score instead.
“Using an ensemble of the k samples, Codex 5-shot CoT reaches the passing score on the three tasks (see Table 1): the USMLE dataset (60.2% ≥ 60%), the MedMCQA dataset (62.7% ≥ 50%), and the PubMedQA dataset (78.2% ≥ 78%).”
“| Human (passing score) | – | 60.0 | 50.0 | – | | Human (expert score) | – | 87.0 | 90.0 | 78.0 |”
Cites
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L., & Polosukhin, I. (2017) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1706.03762 · Cited by 120,404 · cited 2× · see citing works
“, 2018), language models are now ubiquitous in natural language processing, notably, thanks to the Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) and its high compatibility with massively parallel computation hardware.”
BackgroundJakubův, J., Chvalovský, K., Goertzel, Z., et al. (2023) · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · doi:10.4230/lipics.itp.2023.19 · Cited by 76,648 · see citing works
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/n19-1423 · Cited by 48,293 · cited 1× · see citing works
“…word vectors (Mikolov et al., 2013; Pennington et al., 2014) to deep contextualized representations (Peters et al., 2018; Vaswani et al., 2017; Devlin et al., 2018; Radford et al., 2018), language models are now ubiquitous in natural language processing, notably, thanks to the Transformer…”
BackgroundGlove: Global Vectors for Word Representation
Pennington, J., Socher, R., & Manning, C. (2014) · Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) · doi:10.3115/v1/d14-1162 · Cited by 34,071 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Language representations have transformed the field of natural language processing, from simple word vectors (Mikolov et al., 2013; Pennington et al., 2014) to deep contextualized representations (Peters et al.”
BackgroundDistributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality
Mikolov, T., Sutskever, I., Chen, K., Corrado, G., & Dean, J. (2013) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1310.4546 · Cited by 24,533 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Language representations have transformed the field of natural language processing, from simple word vectors (Mikolov et al., 2013; Pennington et al., 2014) to deep contextualized representations (Peters et al., 2018; Vaswani et al., 2017; Devlin et al., 2018; Radford et al., 2018), language models…”
BackgroundLanguage Models are Few-Shot Learners
Brown, T. B., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J., Dhariwal, P., Neelakantan, A., Shyam, P., Sastry, G., Askell, A., et al. (2020) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.14165 · Cited by 23,372 · see citing works
Kaugeranna, R., Kaugeranna, E., & Aion, (. S. 4. 6. (2023) · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · doi:10.4230/lipics.giscience.2023.43 · Cited by 13,695 · see citing works
Deep Contextualized Word Representations
Peters, M., Neumann, M., Iyyer, M., Gardner, M., Clark, C., Lee, K., & Zettlemoyer, L. (2018) · Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/n18-1202 · Cited by 11,983 · see citing works
Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering
Karpukhin, V., Oğuz, B., Min, S., Lewis, P., Wu, L. Y., Edunov, S., Chen, D., & Yih, W.-T. (2020) · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.04906 · Cited by 7,707 · cited 1×
“, 2022) or dense retrievers (Karpukhin et al., 2020), (ii) using a more complete knowledge base Borgeaud et al.”
BackgroundChain-Of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Wei, J., Wang, X., Schuurmans, D., Bosma, M., Ichter, B., Xia, F., Chi, E., Le, Q. V., & Zhou, D. (2022) · Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 · doi:10.52202/068431-1800 · Cited by 4,505 · see citing works
Liu, P., Yuan, W., Fu, J., Jiang, Z., Hayashi, H., & Neubig, G. (2023) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3560815 · Cited by 4,361 · cited 1× · see citing works
“18 Pre-train, prompt, and predict 19 is an emerging paradigm for applying LLMs to new problems without fine-tuning THE BIGGER PICTURE Foundation models have changed the way machine learning is practiced.”
BackgroundLiu, P., Yuan, W., Fu, J., Jiang, Z., Hayashi, H., & Neubig, G. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.13586 · Cited by 4,352 · cited 1× · see citing works
“18 Pre-train, prompt, and predict 19 is an emerging paradigm for applying LLMs to new problems without fine-tuning THE BIGGER PICTURE Foundation models have changed the way machine learning is practiced.”
BackgroundChain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Wei, J., Wang, X., Schuurmans, D., Bosma, M., Ichter, B., Xia, F., Chi, E., Le, Q., & Zhou, D. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2201.11903 · Cited by 4,263 · cited 1× · see citing works
“20 CoT prompting led to substantial improvements on many reasoning-intensive tasks, 20–23 allowing us to bridge the gap with human-level performances for most of the hard BIG-bench tasks.”
BackgroundTraining language models to follow instructions with human feedback
Ouyang, L., Wu, J., Jiang, X., Almeida, D., Wainwright, C. L., Mishkin, P., Zhang, C., Agarwal, S., Slama, K., Ray, A., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.02155 · Cited by 4,208 · cited 2× · see citing works
“Based on detailed answers generated by LLMs, we show that LLMs can often answer challenging medical questions by mobilizing expert knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities.”
BackgroundMethodKung, T. H., Cheatham, M., Medenilla, A., Sillos, C., De Leon, L., Elepaño, C., Madriaga, M., Aggabao, R., Diaz-Candido, G., Maningo, J., et al. (2023) · PLOS Digital Health · doi:10.1371/journal.pdig.0000198 · Cited by 4,115 · cited 2× · see citing works
“33,37 Throughoutthe development of this research, significant progress happened in the open-source world (Llama 2 38 ), and recently, there has been an investigation on both generalist and fine-tuned open-source LLMs applied to medical benchmarks.”
BackgroundLarge language models encode clinical knowledge
Singhal, K., Azizi, S., Tu, T., Mahdavi, S. S., Wei, J., Chung, H. W., Scales, N., Tanwani, A., Cole-Lewis, H., Pfohl, S., et al. (2023) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06291-2 · Cited by 4,083 · cited 2× · see citing works
“33,37 Throughoutthe development of this research, significant progress happened in the open-source world (Llama 2 38 ), and recently, there has been an investigation on both generalist and fine-tuned open-source LLMs applied to medical benchmarks.”
BackgroundDense passage retrieval for open-domain question answering
Karpukhin, V., Oguz, B., Min, S., Lewis, P., Wu, L., Edunov, S., Chen, D., & Yih, W.-T. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) · doi:10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.550 · Cited by 3,575 · see citing works
Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback
Ouyang, L., Wu, J., Jiang, X., Almeida, D., Wainwright, C., Mishkin, P., Zhang, C., Agarwal, S., Slama, K., Ray, A., et al. (2022) · Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 · doi:10.52202/068431-2011 · Cited by 3,117 · cited 2× · see citing works
“Based on detailed answers generated by LLMs, we show that LLMs can often answer challenging medical questions by mobilizing expert knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities.”
BackgroundMethodRetrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks
Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W.-T., Rocktäschel, T., et al. (2020) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.11401 · Cited by 3,101 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Conditioning the predictions on a knowledge base is an alternative research direction for improving language models (Lewis et al., 2020; Borgeaud et al., 2021; Lazaridou et al., 2022).”
BackgroundLlama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models
Touvron, H., Martin, L., Stone, K., Albert, P., Almahairi, A., Babaei, Y., Bashlykov, N., Batra, S., Bhargava, P., Bhosale, S., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.09288 · Cited by 2,604 · cited 1× · see citing works
“33,37 Throughoutthe development of this research, significant progress happened in the open-source world (Llama 2 38 ), and recently, there has been an investigation on both generalist and fine-tuned open-source LLMs applied to medical benchmarks.”
BackgroundPaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways
Chowdhery, A., Narang, S., Devlin, J., Bosma, M., Mishra, G., Roberts, A., Barham, P., Chung, H. W., Sutton, C., Gehrmann, S., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.02311 · Cited by 2,590 · see citing works
Gilson, A., Safranek, C. W., Huang, T., Socrates, V., Chi, L., Taylor, R. A., & Chartash, D. (2023) · JMIR Medical Education · doi:10.2196/45312 · Cited by 2,078 · cited 1× · see citing works
“35 ChatGPT sparked the interest of the public and the research community, which hastened to benchmark it against USMLE questions, 36,37 turning to self-curated data instead of the peer-reviewed MedQA benchmark.”
BackgroundLarge Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners
Kojima, T., Gu, S. S., Reid, M., Matsuo, Y., & Iwasawa, Y. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.11916 · Cited by 2,013 · cited 2× · see citing works
“In the zero-shot CoT setting, this corresponds to the setup described in Kojima et al., 25 and the direct setting corresponds to Brown et al. 7”
MethodLarge language models are zero-shot reasoners
Kojima, T., Gu, S. (., Reid, M., Matsuo, Y., & Iwasawa, Y. (2022) · Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 · doi:10.52202/068431-1613 · Cited by 2,013 · cited 2× · see citing works
“In the zero-shot CoT setting, this corresponds to the setup described in Kojima et al., 25 and the direct setting corresponds to Brown et al. 7”
MethodJudging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena
Zheng, L., Chiang, W.-L., Sheng, Y., Zhuang, S., Wu, Z., Zhuang, Y., Lin, Z., Li, Z., Li, D., Xing, E. P., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2306.05685 · Cited by 1,888 · cited 6× · see citing works
“9 for Vicuna.”
BackgroundInfluentialQLoRA: efficient finetuning of quantized LLMs
Dettmers, T., Pagnoni, A., Holtzman, A., & Zettlemoyer, L. (2023) · Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 · doi:10.52202/075280-0441 · Cited by 1,814 · see citing works
Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
Kaplan, J., McCandlish, S., Henighan, T., Brown, T. B., Chess, B., Child, R., Gray, S., Radford, A., Wu, J., & Amodei, D. (2020) · arXiv · Cited by 1,749 · cited 1× · see citing works
“This so far translated sustain gains (Kaplan et al., 2020), enabled new ways to interact with language models and made many of the past benchmarks obsolete; which triggered a community-wide effort to design a sufficiently difficult benchmarks (e.”
BackgroundToward expert-level medical question answering with large language models
Singhal, K., Tu, T., Gottweis, J., Sayres, R., Wulczyn, E., Amin, M., Hou, L., Clark, K., Pfohl, S. R., Cole-Lewis, H., et al. (2025) · Nature Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41591-024-03423-7 · Cited by 1,734 · see citing works
Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models
Chung, H. W., Hou, L., Longpre, S., Zoph, B., Tay, Y., Fedus, W., Li, Y., Wang, X., Dehghani, M., Brahma, S., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.11416 · Cited by 1,441 · see citing works
Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code
Chen, M., Tworek, J., Jun, H., Yuan, Q., Pinto, H. P. D. O., Kaplan, J., Edwards, H., Burda, Y., Joseph, N., Brockman, G., et al. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.03374 · Cited by 1,436 · cited 2× · see citing works
“Performances were lower for each of the considered CoT cues, except in the case of the USMLE dataset, for which halfoftheCoT prompts resultedinsmallimprovementsover thedirect prompt (+1.1% using CoT prompt #1 vs. using the direct prompt).”
MethodInfluentialRetrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks
Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W.-T., Rocktäschel, T., et al. (2020) · UCL Discovery (University College London) · Cited by 1,187 · see citing works
Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity
Fedus, W., Zoph, B., & Shazeer, N. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2101.03961 · Cited by 1,005 · cited 1× · see citing works
“…(Brown et al., 2020; Rae et al., 2021; Chowdhery et al., 2022; Thoppilan et al., 2022; Hoffmann et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022; Lieber et al., 2021; Fedus et al., 2021; Laurençon et al., 2023) to using hundreds of billions of parameters and to training on gigabytes of text.”
BackgroundTraining Compute-Optimal Large Language Models
Hoffmann, J., Borgeaud, S., Mensch, A., Buchatskaya, E., Cai, T., Rutherford, E., Casas, D. D. L., Hendricks, L. A., Welbl, J., Clark, A., et al. (2022) · Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 · doi:10.52202/068431-2176 · Cited by 932 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Large Language Models (LLMs) In recent years, tremendous resources have been allocated to scale Transformer-based language models (Brown et al., 2020; Rae et al., 2021; Chowdhery et al., 2022; Thoppilan et al., 2022; Hoffmann et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022; Lieber et al., 2021; Fedus et al., 2021…”
BackgroundTraining Compute-Optimal Large Language Models
Hoffmann, J., Borgeaud, S., Mensch, A., Buchatskaya, E., Cai, T., Rutherford, E., Casas, D. D. L., Hendricks, L. A., Welbl, J., Clark, A., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.15556 · Cited by 929 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Large Language Models (LLMs) In recent years, tremendous resources have been allocated to scale Transformer-based language models (Brown et al., 2020; Rae et al., 2021; Chowdhery et al., 2022; Thoppilan et al., 2022; Hoffmann et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022; Lieber et al., 2021; Fedus et al., 2021…”
BackgroundSelf-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models
Wang, X., Wei, J., Schuurmans, D., Le, Q., Chi, E., Narang, S., Chowdhery, A., & Zhou, D. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.11171 · Cited by 829 · cited 7× · see citing works
“Generating and combining many CoTs bridges the gap with human-level performances CoTs can be combined and/or filtered using human or automated feedback (Wang et al., 2022; Cobbe et al., 2021).”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialLaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications
Thoppilan, R., De Freitas, D., Hall, J., Shazeer, N., Kulshreshtha, A., Cheng, H.-T., Jin, A., Bos, T., Baker, L., Du, Y., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2201.08239 · Cited by 778 · see citing works
Evaluating large language models trained on code
Chen, M. (2024) · TIB Data Manager · doi:10.57702/wbv3e61b · Cited by 737 · see citing works
Jin, D., Pan, E., Oufattole, N., Weng, W.-H., Fang, H., & Szolovits, P. (2021) · Applied Sciences · doi:10.3390/app11146421 · Cited by 718 · see citing works
PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering
Jin, Q., Dhingra, B., Liu, Z., Cohen, W., & Lu, X. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) · doi:10.18653/v1/d19-1259 · Cited by 685 · cited 1× · see citing works
“45 The three datasets are summarized in Table 2.”
BackgroundTraining Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems
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“Generating and combining many CoTs bridges the gap with human-level performances CoTs can be combined and/or filtered using human or automated feedback (Wang et al., 2022; Cobbe et al., 2021).”
BackgroundBeyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
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“Fine-tuned BERT, BioLinkBERT 58 ; DPR, dense passage retrieval.”
Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems
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QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs
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Opt: Open pre-trained transformer language models
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Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens
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“39 ,”
Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models
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“CoT prompting led to substantial improvements on many reasoning-intensive tasks (Wei et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2022; Drozdov et al., 2022; Nye et al., 2021), allowing to bridge the gap with human-level performances for most of the hard BIG-bench tasks (Suzgun et al.”
BackgroundLinkBERT: Pretraining Language Models with Document Links
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Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models
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Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding
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“At the dawn of this research work, although LLMs had been tested on large benchmarks (MMLU, 31 BIG-bench 18 ), studies applied to the medical domain were still needed.”
MethodSmith, S., Patwary, M., Norick, B., LeGresley, P., Rajbhandari, S., Casper, J., Liu, Z., Prabhumoye, S., Zerveas, G., Korthikanti, V., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2201.11990 · Cited by 286 · cited 1× · see citing works
“…Transformer-based language models (Brown et al., 2020; Rae et al., 2021; Chowdhery et al., 2022; Thoppilan et al., 2022; Hoffmann et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022; Lieber et al., 2021; Fedus et al., 2021; Laurençon et al., 2023) to using hundreds of billions of parameters…”
BackgroundLIMA: Less Is More for Alignment
Zhou, C., Liu, P., Xu, P., Iyer, S., Sun, J., Mao, Y., Ma, X., Efrat, A., Yu, P., Yu, L., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.11206 · Cited by 275 · cited 1× · see citing works
“31”
LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment
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“31”
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“29,30 Nonetheless, LLMs are powerful tools and therefore have the potential to transform the field of machine intelligence.”
BackgroundChallenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them
Suzgun, M., Scales, N., Schärli, N., Gehrmann, S., Tay, Y., Chung, H. W., Chowdhery, A., Le, Q., Chi, E., Zhou, D., et al. (2023) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.824 · Cited by 253 · see citing works
Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher
Rae, J. W., Borgeaud, S., Cai, T., Millican, K., Hoffmann, J., Song, F., Aslanides, J., Henderson, S., Ring, R., Young, S., et al. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.11446 · Cited by 235 · see citing works
Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
Kadavath, S., Conerly, T., Askell, A., Henighan, T., Drain, D., Perez, E., Schiefer, N., Hatfield-Dodds, Z., DasSarma, N., Tran-Johnson, E., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.05221 · Cited by 187 · see citing works
PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question AnsweringPreprint
Jin, Q., Dhingra, B., Liu, Z., Cohen, W. W., & Lu, X. (2019) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1909.06146 · Cited by 182 · cited 1× · see citing works
“45 The three datasets are summarized in Table 2.”
BackgroundOn the Advance of Making Language Models Better ReasonersPreprint
Li, Y., Lin, Z., Zhang, S., Fu, Q., Chen, B., Lou, J.-G., & Chen, W.-Z. (2022) · arXiv.org · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2206.02336 · Cited by 165 · cited 2× · see citing works
“…language models (Brown et al., 2020; Rae et al., 2021; Chowdhery et al., 2022; Thoppilan et al., 2022; Hoffmann et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022; Lieber et al., 2021; Fedus et al., 2021; Laurençon et al., 2023) to using hundreds of billions of parameters and to training on…”
BackgroundMedMCQA : A Large-scale Multi-Subject Multi-Choice Dataset for Medical domain Question Answering
Pal, A., Umapathi, L. K., & Sankarasubbu, M. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.14371 · Cited by 157 · cited 1× · see citing works
“…question answering datasets: USMLE, whichincludesdifficult real-world medicalques-tions targeting medical professionals 32 ; the MedMCQA, which gathers questions from medical school entrance exams 44 ; and the PubMedQA, which includes reading comprehension questions about PubMed abstracts.”
BackgroundShow Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models
Nye, M., Andreassen, A. J., Gur-Ari, G., Michalewski, H., Austin, J., Bieber, D., Dohan, D., Lewkowycz, A., Bosma, M., Luan, D., et al. (2021) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.00114 · Cited by 144 · cited 1× · see citing works
“20 CoT prompting led to substantial improvements on many reasoning-intensive tasks, 20–23 allowing us to bridge the gap with human-level performances for most of the hard BIG-bench tasks.”
BackgroundSezgın, E., Sirrianni, J., & Linwood, S. L. (2022) · JMIR Medical Informatics · doi:10.2196/32875 · Cited by 129 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Therefore, deploying LLMs into sensitive areas such as healthcare must be operated with great care (Korngiebel & Mooney, 2021; Sezgin et al., 2022).”
BackgroundMEDITRON-70B: Scaling Medical Pretraining for Large Language Models
Chen, Z., Cano, A. H., Romanou, A., Bonnet, A., Matoba, K., Salvi, F., Pagliardini, M., Fan, S., Köpf, A., Mohtashami, A., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.16079 · Cited by 122 · cited 1× · see citing works
“39 ,”
Adversarial GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Robustness Evaluation of Language Models
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“28 Therefore, deploying LLMs into sensitive areas such as healthcare must be operated with great care.”
BackgroundGPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model
Black, S., Biderman, S., Hallahan, E., Anthony, Q., Gao, L., Golding, L., He, H., Leahy, C., McDonell, K., Phang, J., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.06745 · Cited by 67 · cited 1× · see citing works
“57 We usedgreedydecoding(temperature t = 0)with k = 1sampleunlessspecified otherwise (e.g., ensemble methods).”
Augmenting Black-box LLMs with Medical Textbooks for Biomedical Question Answering
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Internet-augmented language models through few-shot prompting for open-domain question answering
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“49 We investigated whether grounding the model with additional context could improve the answering accuracy.”
BackgroundThe BigScience ROOTS Corpus: A 1.6TB Composite Multilingual Dataset
Laurençon, H., Saulnier, L., Wang, T., Akiki, C., del Moral, A. V., Scao, T. L., Von Werra, L., Mou, C., Ponferrada, E. G., Nguyen, H., et al. (2023) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.03915 · Cited by 61 · see citing works
ThoughtSource: A central hub for large language model reasoning data
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“51 All our benchmark results are summarized in supplemental information section A and Table S2.”
BackgroundSelf-citationChallenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them
Suzgun, M., Scales, N., Schärli, N., Gehrmann, S., Tay, Y., Chung, H. W., Chowdhery, A., Le, Q. V., Chi, E. H., Zhou, D., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.09261 · Cited by 44 · cited 1× · see citing works
“, 2021), allowing to bridge the gap with human-level performances for most of the hard BIG-bench tasks (Suzgun et al., 2022).”
BackgroundCompositional Semantic Parsing with Large Language ModelsPreprint
Drozdov, A., Nathanael Schärli, A., Akyürek, E., Scales, N., Song, X., Chen, X., Bousquet, O., & Zhou, D. (2022) · arXiv (Cornell University) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.15003 · Cited by 43 · cited 1× · see citing works
“CoT prompting led to substantial improvements on many reasoning-intensive tasks (Wei et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2022; Drozdov et al., 2022; Nye et al., 2021), allowing to bridge the gap with human-level performances for most of the hard BIG-bench tasks (Suzgun et al.”
BackgroundVariational Open-Domain Question Answering
Liévin, V., Motzfeldt, A. G., Jensen, I. R., & Winther, O. (2022) · Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.06345 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Self-citationBERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.04805 · cited 1×
“…word vectors (Mikolov et al., 2013; Pennington et al., 2014) to deep contextualized representations (Peters et al., 2018; Vaswani et al., 2017; Devlin et al., 2018; Radford et al., 2018), language models are now ubiquitous in natural language processing, notably, thanks to the Transformer…”
BackgroundOPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models
Zhang, S., Roller, S., Goyal, N., Artetxe, M., Chen, M., Chen, S., Dewan, C., Diab, M., Li, X., Lin, X. V., et al. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2205.01068 · cited 1×
“Large Language Models (LLMs) In recent years, tremendous resources have been allocated to scale Transformer-based language models (Brown et al., 2020; Rae et al., 2021; Chowdhery et al., 2022; Thoppilan et al., 2022; Hoffmann et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022; Lieber et al., 2021; Fedus et al., 2021…”
BackgroundDeep contextualized word representations
Peters, M. E., Neumann, M., Iyyer, M., et al. (2018) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1802.05365
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Large language models encode clinical knowledge
Singhal, K., Azizi, S., Tu, T., Mahdavi, S. S., Wei, J., Chung, H. W., Scales, N., Tanwani, A., Cole-Lewis, H., Pfohl, S., et al. (2023) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06291-2 · Cited by 4,083 · see citing works
“[50] used Instruct GPT-3, an instruction-tuned LLM [63], and applied chain-of-thought prompting [91] on top to improve the results on the MedQA, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA datasets.”
BackgroundMethodKung, T. H., Cheatham, M., Medenilla, A., Sillos, C., De Leon, L., Elepaño, C., Madriaga, M., Aggabao, R., Diaz-Candido, G., Maningo, J., et al. (2023) · PLOS Digital Health · doi:10.1371/journal.pdig.0000198 · Cited by 4,115 · see citing works
A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models
Chang, Y., Wang, X., Wang, J., Wu, Y., Yang, L., Zhu, K., Chen, H., Yi, X., Wang, C., Wang, Y., et al. (2024) · ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology · doi:10.1145/3641289 · Cited by 2,842 · see citing works
“In professional domain reasoning tasks, zeroshot InstructGPT and Codex are capable of complex medical reasoning tasks, but still need to be further improved (Liévin et al., 2022).”
BackgroundToward expert-level medical question answering with large language models
Singhal, K., Tu, T., Gottweis, J., Sayres, R., Wulczyn, E., Amin, M., Hou, L., Clark, K., Pfohl, S. R., Cole-Lewis, H., et al. (2025) · Nature Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41591-024-03423-7 · Cited by 1,734 · see citing works
“In particular, these models have demonstrated impressive capabilities on multiple-choice research benchmarks 1–3 .”
Cascella, M., Montomoli, J., Bellini, V., & Bignami, E. (2023) · Journal of Medical Systems · doi:10.1007/s10916-023-01925-4 · Cited by 1,120 · see citing works
Evaluating the Performance of ChatGPT in Ophthalmology
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“There has been recent interest in evaluating the capabilities of LLMs for understanding and generating natural language in medicine 9 10 .”
BackgroundA Categorical Archive of ChatGPT Failures
Borji, A. (2023) · doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-2895792/v1 · Cited by 514 · see citing works
Large Language Models in Medicine: The Potentials and Pitfalls
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ChatGPT: The End of Online Exam Integrity?
Susnjak, T. (2022) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.09292 · Cited by 370 · see citing works
Opportunities and Challenges for ChatGPT and Large Language Models in Biomedicine and Health
Tian, S., Jin, Q., Yeganova, L., Lai, P.-T., Zhu, Q., Chen, X., Yang, Y., Chen, Q., Kim, W., Comeau, D. C., et al. (2023) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbad493 · Cited by 359 · see citing works
“…Encoder Representations from Transformers) [17] and its variants, decoder-only LMs such as the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) family [18-20] and encoder-decoder LMs such as T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer) [21] and BART (Bidirectional and AutoRegressive Transformers) [22].”
BackgroundThe shaky foundations of large language models and foundation models for electronic health records
Wornow, M., Xu, Y., Thapa, R., Patel, B., Steinberg, E., Fleming, S., Pfeffer, M. A., Fries, J., & Shah, N. H. (2023) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-023-00879-8 · Cited by 324 · see citing works
Matching patients to clinical trials with large language models
Jin, Q., Wang, Z., Floudas, C. S., Chen, F., Gong, C., Bracken-Clarke, D., Xue, E., Yang, Y., Sun, J., & Lu, Z. (2024) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-024-53081-z · Cited by 287 · see citing works
Large AI Models in Health Informatics: Applications, Challenges, and the Future
Qiu, J., Li, L., Sun, J., Peng, J., Shi, P., Zhang, R., Dong, Y., Lam, K., Lo, F. P.-W., Xiao, B. J., et al. (2023) · IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics · doi:10.1109/jbhi.2023.3316750 · Cited by 246 · see citing works
“As prompt engineering has become a key technique for investigating and improving LLMs, Liévin et al. [128] have also applied various prompt engineering on the GPT-3.”
MethodCan ChatGPT pass the life support exams without entering the American heart association course?
Fijačko, N., Gosak, L., Štiglic, G., Picard, C. T., & John Douma, M. (2023) · Resuscitation · doi:10.1016/j.resuscitation.2023.109732 · Cited by 206 · see citing works
ChatGPT: The End of Online Exam Integrity?
Sušnjak, T., & McIntosh, T. R. (2024) · Education Sciences · doi:10.3390/educsci14060656 · Cited by 245 · see citing works
Temsah, M.-H., Aljamaan, F., Malki, K. H., Alhasan, K., Altamimi, I., Aljarbou, R., Bazuhair, F., Alsubaihin, A., Abdulmajeed, N., Alshahrani, F. S., et al. (2023) · Healthcare · doi:10.3390/healthcare11131812 · Cited by 179 · see citing works
AI chatbots not yet ready for clinical use.
Au Yeung, J., Kraljevic, Z., Luintel, A., Balston, A., Idowu, E., Dobson, R. J., & Teo, J. T. (2023) · Frontiers in Digital Health · doi:10.3389/fdgth.2023.1161098 · Cited by 176 · see citing works
“Transformer-based LLMs have demonstrated close to human-level performances in medical question and answering benchmarks and summarisation tasks (7–9), and with techniques like self-consistency (9), chain of thought prompting (10), and reinforcement learning from human feedback (11) the model performance can be further…”
BackgroundPre-trained Language Models in Biomedical Domain: A Systematic Survey
Wang, B., Xie, Q., Pei, J., Chen, Z., Tiwari, P., Li, Z., & Fu, J. (2023) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3611651 · Cited by 206 · see citing works
“Fortunately, we have witnessed a preliminary sign that we started to investigate large language models in medical/clinical tasks [174, 187, 270], especially BIOGPT [187], PubMedGPT 68, and Flan-PaLM [270].”
BackgroundJin, Q., Yang, Y., Chen, Q., & Lu, Z. (2024) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btae075 · Cited by 176 · see citing works
“They also achieve state-of-the-art performance on many domain-specific tasks like biomedical question answering (Singhal et al., 2022; Liévin et al., 2022; Nori et al., 2023).”
BackgroundPrompt engineering for healthcare: Methodologies and applications
Wang, J., Shi, E., Yu, S., Wu, Z., Hu, H., Ma, C., Dai, H., Yang, Q., Kang, Y., Wu, J., et al. (2025) · Meta-Radiology · doi:10.1016/j.metrad.2025.100190 · Cited by 220 · see citing works
Retrieval-augmented generation for generative artificial intelligence in health care
Yang, R., Ning, Y., Keppo, E., Liu, M., Hong, C., Bitterman, D. S., Ong, J. C. L., Ting, D. S. W., & Liu, N. (2025) · npj Health Systems · doi:10.1038/s44401-024-00004-1 · Cited by 175 · see citing works
“Although some research has attempted to enhance models ’ reasoning abilities and transparency through approaches like chain of thought 34 , multi-agent discussion 35 , and post-hoc attribution 36 , there are still limitations in medical applications 37 .”
Hidden flaws behind expert-level accuracy of multimodal GPT-4 vision in medicine
Jin, Q., Chen, F., Zhou, Y., Xu, Z., Cheung, J. M., Chen, R., Summers, R. M., Rousseau, J. F., Ni, P., Landsman, M. J., et al. (2024) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-024-01185-7 · Cited by 146 · see citing works
“These re fl ect the multimodal nature of the task as well as the commonly evaluated capabilities for text-only LLMs 6,8 .”
BackgroundSavelka, J., Agarwal, A., An, M., Bogart, C., & Sakr, M. (2023) · Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V.1 · doi:10.1145/3568813.3600142 · Cited by 141 · see citing works
“Others have used GPT models to solve various MCQ-based exams, including the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), with accuracy around 50% [13, 22, 27], the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) [3, 18], and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Regulation (REG) exam [2].”
MethodResultAl-Ashwal, F. Y., Zawiah, M., Gharaibeh, L., Abu-Farha, R., & Bitar, A. N. (2023) · Drug Healthcare and Patient Safety · doi:10.2147/dhps.s425858 · Cited by 125 · see citing works
Wang, D., Feng, L., Ye, J., Zou, J., & Zheng, Y. (2023) · MedComm – Future Medicine · doi:10.1002/mef2.43 · Cited by 123 · see citing works
Generative Artificial Intelligence Through ChatGPT and Other Large Language Models in Ophthalmology
Tan, T. F., Thirunavukarasu, A. J., Campbell, J. P., Keane, P. A., Pasquale, L. R., Abràmoff, M. D., Kalpathy–Cramer, J., Lum, F., Kim, J. E., Baxter, S. L., et al. (2023) · Ophthalmology Science · doi:10.1016/j.xops.2023.100394 · Cited by 120 · see citing works
“33 Potential additional features that can be explored include uncertainty-aware LLM applications that provide a probability score of generated responses, along with alternative recommendations when the probability score is low, as well as reporting the differential weights of input tokens that…”
BackgroundPerformance of large language models on a neurology board-style examination
Schubert, M. C., Wick, W., & Venkataramani, V. (2023) · JAMA Network Open · doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.46721 · Cited by 115 · see citing works
The Diagnostic and Triage Accuracy of the GPT-3 Artificial Intelligence Model
Levine, D. M., Tuwani, R., Kompa, B., Varma, A., Finlayson, S. G., Mehrotra, A., & Beam, A. (2023) · doi:10.1101/2023.01.30.23285067 · Cited by 106 · see citing works
Prompt Engineering in Healthcare
Patil, R., Heston, T. F., & Bhuse, V. (2024) · Electronics · doi:10.3390/electronics13152961 · Cited by 93 · see citing works
Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization
Tseng, Y.-M., Huang, Y.-C., Hsiao, T.-Y., Chen, W.-L., Huang, C.-W., Meng, Y., & Chen, Y.-N. (2024) · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 · doi:10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.969 · Cited by 87 · see citing works
Application of large language models in medicine
Liu, F., Zhou, H., Gu, B., Zou, X., Huang, J., Wu, J., Li, Y., Chen, S. S., Hua, Y., Zhou, P., et al. (2025) · Nature Reviews Bioengineering · doi:10.1038/s44222-025-00279-5 · Cited by 94 · see citing works
Leveraging long context in retrieval augmented language models for medical question answering
Zhang, G., Xu, Z., Jin, Q., Chen, F., Fang, Y., Liu, Y., Rousseau, J. F., Xu, Z., Lu, Z., Weng, C., et al. (2025) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-025-01651-w · Cited by 81 · see citing works
“In particular, we evaluate general-purpose LLMs on answering medical QA questions that require domain knowledge in depth 1,26,38 – 41 .”
Benefits, limits, and risks of ChatGPT in medicine
Tangsrivimol, J. A., Darzidehkalani, E., Virk, H. U. H., Wang, Z., Egger, J., Wang, M., Hacking, S. M., Glicksberg, B. S., Strauß, M., & Krittanawong, C. (2025) · Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.3389/frai.2025.1518049 · Cited by 85 · see citing works
“…application in everyday healthcare settings, proving beneficial in providing information, answering queries, and offering support to both healthcare professionals and patients (Liévin et al., 2022; Sallam, 2023; Ahn, 2023; Curtis and ChatGPT, 2023; D'Amico et al., 2023; Donato et al., 2023).”
Evaluating the ChatGPT family of models for biomedical reasoning and classification
Chen, S., Li, Y., Lu, S., Van, H., Aerts, H. J. W. L., Savova, G. K., & Bitterman, D. S. (2024) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1093/jamia/ocad256 · Cited by 91 · see citing works
Limitations of large language models in clinical problem-solving arising from inflexible reasoning
Kim, J., Podlasek, A., Shidara, K., Liu, F., Alaa, A., & Bernardo, D. (2025) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-025-22940-0 · Cited by 78 · see citing works
“Excellent LLM performance across multiple domains in medical question and answer (QA) benchmarks has been postulated, in part, to reflect emergent reasoning capabilities[10, 11].”
Hulmán, Á., Dollerup, O. L., Mortensen, J. F., Fenech, M. E., Norman, K., Støvring, H., & Hansen, T. K. (2023) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0290773 · Cited by 73 · see citing works
Evaluation and mitigation of cognitive biases in medical language models
Schmidgall, S., Harris, C., Essien, I., Olshvang, D., Rahman, T., Kim, J. W., Ziaei, R., Eshraghian, J., Abadir, P., & Chellappa, R. (2024) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-024-01283-6 · Cited by 68 · see citing works
“One study investigated if language models can effectively handle medical questions 20 , revealing that they can approximate human performance with chain-of-thought reasoning.”
Systematic Analysis of Retrieval-Augmented Generation-Based LLMs for Medical Chatbot Applications
Bora, A., & Cuayáhuitl, H. (2024) · Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction · doi:10.3390/make6040116 · Cited by 73 · see citing works
The impending impacts of large language models on medical education
Ahn, S. (2023) · Korean journal of medical education · doi:10.3946/kjme.2023.253 · Cited by 62 · see citing works
“medical questions with a rather high level of accuracy [3,7].”
BackgroundTaylor, R. A., Sangal, R. B., Smith, M. E., Haimovich, A. D., Rodman, A., Iscoe, M. S., Pavuluri, S. K., Rose, C., Janke, A. T., Wright, D. S., et al. (2025) · Academic Emergency Medicine · doi:10.1111/acem.15066 · Cited by 62 · see citing works
Large Language Models in Medical Diagnostics: Scoping Review With Bibliometric Analysis
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Examining ChatGPT Performance on USMLE Sample Items and Implications for Assessment
Yaneva, V., Baldwin, P., Jurich, D. P., Swygert, K. A., & Clauser, B. E. (2023) · Academic Medicine · doi:10.1097/acm.0000000000005549 · Cited by 60 · see citing works
Lahat, A., Sharif, Κ., Zoabi, N., Patt, Y. S., Sharif, Y., Fisher, L., Shani, U., Arow, M., Levin, R., & Klang, E. (2024) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/54571 · Cited by 58 · see citing works
“5), which managed to score approximately 60% on the USMLE (United States Medical Licensing Examination) [18].”
Performance of ChatGPT on the MCAT: The Road to Personalized and Equitable Premedical LearningPreprint
Bommineni, V. L., Bhagwagar, S. Z., Balcarcel, D. R., Davatzikos, C. A., & Boyer, D. L. (2023) · medRxiv · doi:10.1101/2023.03.05.23286533 · Cited by 55 · see citing works
Enhancing knowledge retrieval with in-context learning and semantic search through generative AI
Ghali, M.-K., Farrag, A., Won, D., & Jin, Y. (2025) · Knowledge-Based Systems · doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2025.113047 · Cited by 53 · see citing works
“Task-specific methods like chain-of-thought [13, 14, 15] emulate expert-like problem-solving.”
Quantifying the reasoning abilities of LLMs on clinical cases
Qiu, P., Wu, C., Liu, S., Fan, Y., Zhao, W., Chen, Z., Gu, H., Peng, C., Zhang, Y., Wang, Y., et al. (2025) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-025-64769-1 · Cited by 53 · see citing works
“First, these benchmarks predominantly focus on exam-style 19,20 questions or sourcing from online conversational cases 18 , these sour-cestypicallydonotfullycapturethedepth,complexity,andstructured reasoning present in real-world clinical practice.”
Kwon, T., Ong, K. T.-I., Kang, D.-J., Moon, S., Lee, J. R., Hwang, D., Sohn, B., Sim, Y., Lee, D. H., & Yeo, J. (2024) · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1609/aaai.v38i16.29802 · Cited by 52 · see citing works
ThoughtSource: A central hub for large language model reasoning data
Ott, S., Hebenstreit, K., Liévin, V., Hother, C., Moradi, M., Mayrhauser, M., Praas, R., Winther, O., & Samwald, M. (2023) · Scientific Data · doi:10.1038/s41597-023-02433-3 · Cited by 52 · see citing works
Self-citationChoi, W. (2023) · BMC Medical Education · doi:10.1186/s12909-023-04832-x · Cited by 48 · see citing works
Su, M.-C., Lin, L.-E., Lin, L.-H., & Chen, Y. (2024) · International Journal of Nursing Studies · doi:10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2024.104717 · Cited by 48 · see citing works
Performance of ChatGPT on registered nurse license exam in Taiwan: a descriptive study
Huang, H. (2023) · Healthcare · doi:10.3390/healthcare11212855 · Cited by 48 · see citing works
“It achieved a score of 60.2% in the US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), 57.7% in Multiple-choice medical exam questions (MedMCQA), and 78.2% in the medical reading comprehension dataset (PubMedQA) [27,29].”
BackgroundInfluentialChatGPT: Transforming Healthcare with AI
Neha, F., Bhati, D., Shukla, D. K., & Amiruzzaman, M. (2024) · AI · doi:10.3390/ai5040126 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
Kumah-Crystal, Y. A., Mankowitz, S. L., Embí, P. J., & Lehmann, C. U. (2023) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1093/jamia/ocad104 · Cited by 45 · see citing works
Summarizing, Simplifying, and Synthesizing Medical Evidence using GPT-3 (with Varying Success)
Shaib, C., Li, M., Joseph, S. A., Marshall, I. J., Li, J. J., & Wallace, B. (2023) · Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.119 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Mind meets machine: Unravelling GPT-4’s cognitive psychology
Dhingra, S., Singh, M., Vaisakh, S. B., Malviya, N., & Gill, S. S. (2023) · BenchCouncil Transactions on Benchmarks Standards and Evaluations · doi:10.1016/j.tbench.2023.100139 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
KoSEL: Knowledge subgraph enhanced large language model for medical question answering
Zeng, Z., Cheng, Q., Hu, X., Zhuang, Y., Liu, X., He, K., & Liu, Z. (2024) · Knowledge-Based Systems · doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2024.112837 · Cited by 45 · see citing works
Large language models provide unsafe answers to patient-posed medical questions
Draelos, R. L., Afreen, S., Blasko, B., Brazile, T. L., Chase, N., Desai, D. P., Evert, J., Gardner, H. L., Herrmann, L., House, A. V., et al. (2026) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-026-02428-5 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
MedBench: A Large-Scale Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Medical Large Language Models
Cai, Y., Wang, L., Wang, Y., De Melo, G., Zhang, Y., Wang, Y., & He, L. (2024) · Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1609/aaai.v38i16.29723 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
Mansoor, I., Abdullah, M., Rizwan, M. D., & Fraz, M. M. (2025) · Health Information Science and Systems · doi:10.1007/s13755-025-00403-0 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
“Liévin et al. [71] evaluated InstructGPT, Codex, and LLaMA-2 70B using zero-shot direct prompts , zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) , and few-shot ensemble prompting enhanced with domain-specific cues and BM25-based retrieval from Wikipedia (a form of RAG).”
Wu, J., Wu, X., Qiu, Z., Li, M., Lin, S., Zhang, Y., Zheng, Y., Yuan, C., & Yang, J. (2024) · Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association · doi:10.1093/jamia/ocae079 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
“11 The insufficiency of data and training impedes LLMs in understanding the intricate concepts 29 and encoding the necessary clinical expertise in non-English environment, 30 which is essential for accurate clinical inference.”
BackgroundUnraveling the landscape of large language models: a systematic review and future perspectives
Ding, Q., Ding, D., Wang, Y., Guan, C., & Ding, B. (2023) · Journal of Electronic Business & Digital Economics · doi:10.1108/jebde-08-2023-0015 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
Large language models and synthetic health data: progress and prospects
Smolyak, D., Bjarnadóttir, M. V., Crowley, K., & Agarwal, R. (2024) · JAMIA Open · doi:10.1093/jamiaopen/ooae114 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
Can ChatGPT Guide Parents on Tympanostomy Tube Insertion?
Moise, A., Centomo-Bozzo, A., Orishchak, O., Alnoury, M. K., & Daniel, S. J. (2023) · Children · doi:10.3390/children10101634 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
“One of the tool’s fundamental strengths is its ability to elucidate complex medical terminology and describe complex physiology in a succinct manner [1–4].”
BackgroundOjeda, A. D., Solano-Barliza, A. D., Álvarez, D. D. O., & Boom-Cárcamo, E. (2023) · Formación universitaria · doi:10.4067/s0718-50062023000600061 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
AI in Dental Radiology—Improving the Efficiency of Reporting With ChatGPT: Comparative Study
Stephan, D., Bertsch, A., Burwinkel, M., Vinayahalingam, S., Al‐Nawas, B., Kämmerer, P. W., & Thiem, D. G. E. (2024) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/60684 · Cited by 37 · see citing works
Patel, D. D., Raut, G., Zimlichman, E., Cheetirala, S. N., Nadkarni, G. N., Glicksberg, B. S., Apakama, D. U., Bell, E., Freeman, R., Timsina, P., et al. (2024) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-024-66933-x · Cited by 32 · see citing works
ChatGPT in pharmacometrics? Potential opportunities and limitations
Cloesmeijer, M. E., Janßen, A., Koopman, S. F., Cnossen, M. H., & Mathôt, R. A. A. (2023) · British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology · doi:10.1111/bcp.15895 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
EYE-Llama, an in-domain large language model for ophthalmology
Haghighi, T., Gholami, S., Sokol, J. T., Kishnani, E., Ahsaniyan, A., Rahmanian, H., Hedayati, F., Leng, T., & Alam, M. N. (2025) · iScience · doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.112984 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
Kong, Z. Y., Adi, V. S. K., Segovia‐Hernández, J. G., & Sunarso, J. (2023) · Digital Chemical Engineering · doi:10.1016/j.dche.2023.100126 · Cited by 29 · see citing works
The potential of ChatGPT in medicine: an example analysis of nephrology specialty exams in Poland
Nicikowski, J., Szczepański, M., Miedziaszczyk, M., & Kudliński, B. (2024) · Clinical Kidney Journal · doi:10.1093/ckj/sfae193 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
“( 2023) , with a 46% accuracy for the algorithm, with zero suggestions, as well as in neurology exam answers [7 ,28 ].”
BackgroundAutomating expert-level medical reasoning evaluation of large language models
Zhou, S., Xie, W., Li, J., Zhan, Z., Song, M., Yang, H., Espinoza, C., Welton, L., Mai, X., Jin, Y., et al. (2025) · npj Digital Medicine · doi:10.1038/s41746-025-02208-7 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
“Incontrast, humanevaluationremainsthegold standard for assessing factuality and nuance but is labor-intensive and limited in scale 25 .”
Computational Politeness in Natural Language Processing: A Survey
Priya, P., Firdaus, M., & Ekbal, A. (2024) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3654660 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
Centering health equity in large language model deployment
Singh, N. P., Lawrence, K. S., Richardson, S. I., & Mann, D. M. (2023) · PLOS Digital Health · doi:10.1371/journal.pdig.0000367 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
Huang, T.-Y., Hsieh, P. H., & Chang, Y. (2024) · JMIR Medical Education · doi:10.2196/59902 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
“This highlights some areas where AI-assisted medical interactions can be improved [17-19].”
Fisch, U., Kliem, P. S. C., Grzonka, P., & Sutter, R. (2024) · BMJ Health & Care Informatics · doi:10.1136/bmjhci-2023-100978 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
Kuerbanjiang, W., Peng, S., Jiamaliding, Y., & Yi, Y. (2024) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/63626 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
A Critical Review of Methods and Challenges in Large Language Models
Asgari, R., Moradi, M., Yan, K., Colwell, D., & Samwald, M. (2025) · Computers, materials & continua/Computers, materials & continua (Print) · doi:10.32604/cmc.2025.061263 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
“Widely adopted across fields like healthcare, finance, education, and technology, LLMs demonstrate versatility and transformative impact [3,4,13,14].”
FoodSky: A food-oriented large language model that can pass the chef and dietetic examinations
Zhou, P., Min, W., Fu, C., Jin, Y., Huang, M., Li, X., Mei, S., & Jiang, S. (2025) · Patterns · doi:10.1016/j.patter.2025.101234 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Artificial intelligence agents in cancer research and oncology
Truhn, D., Azizi, S., Zou, J., Cerdá-Alberich, L., Mahmood, F., & Kather, J. N. (2026) · Nature reviews. Cancer · doi:10.1038/s41568-025-00900-0 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
Wang, N., Chen, Y., & Zhang, D. (2025) · The Innovation Energy · doi:10.59717/j.xinn-energy.2025.100087 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Moglia, A., Georgiou, K. E., Cerveri, P., Mainardi, L. T., Satava, R. M., & Cuschieri, A. (2024) · Artificial Intelligence Review · doi:10.1007/s10462-024-10849-5 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
Artificial Intelligence for Risk Assessment on Primary Prevention of Coronary Artery Disease
Chen, S., Loguercio, S., Chen, K., Lee, S. E., Park, J., Liu, S., Sadaei, H. J., & Torkamani, A. (2023) · Current Cardiovascular Risk Reports · doi:10.1007/s12170-023-00731-4 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
“Liévin et al. recently explored the capacity of general-purpose LLMs to reason through complex medical questions [239].”
BackgroundShukla, R., Mishra, A. K., Banerjee, N., & Verma, A. (2024) · Cureus · doi:10.7759/cureus.58232 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
“Recently, there has been interest in assessing large language models' (LLMs) capacity to comprehend and produce natural language in the medical field [4].”
BackgroundUranbey, Ö., Özbey, F., Kaygisiz, Ö. F., & Ayrancı, F. (2024) · Cureus · doi:10.7759/cureus.58607 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
“Integrating AI into healthcare systems is of paramount importance due to its capacity to enhance precision and reduce time requirements in various aspects of the healthcare ecosystem [12].”
BackgroundIlicki, J. (2023) · Mayo Clinic Proceedings Digital Health · doi:10.1016/j.mcpdig.2023.03.006 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
Developing ChatGPT for biology and medicine: a complete review of biomedical question answering
Li, Q., Li, L., & Li, Y. (2024) · Biophysics Reports · doi:10.52601/bpr.2024.240004 · Cited by 24 · see citing works
“It surpasses other language models trained on specific domains, such as Wikipedia, news, or books, without the need for these domain-specific training datasets.”
BackgroundDeep Learning in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Trends
Wang, R., Chen, F., Chen, H., Lin, C. X., Shuai, J., Wu, Y., Ma, L., Hu, X., Wu, M. H., Wang, J., et al. (2025) · MedComm · doi:10.1002/mco2.70247 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
“…a vast amount of medical knowledge and reasoning ability through the pretraining process, enabling them to apply existing knowledge and reasoning strategies when processing new image data, thus improving diagnostic efficiency and accuracy, even in cases of low image data availability [352–354].”
Dwyer, B., Flathers, M., Sano, A., Dempsey, A. G., Cipriani, A., Gazi, A. H., Hill, B., Gorban, C., Rodríguez, C. I., Stromeyer, C., et al. (2025) · NPP—Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/s44277-025-00049-6 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Lonergan, R. M., Curry, J., Dhas, K., & Simmons, B. I. (2023) · Cureus · doi:10.7759/cureus.48788 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
“The second gap is that existing work evaluating LLM performance on medical question-and-answer datasets tends to assess accuracy across the dataset as a whole, masking any variation present in relevant subgroups of the data, such as medical specialty [4,10].”
BackgroundMethodPrompt-based Extraction of Social Determinants of Health Using Few-shot Learning
Ramachandran, G. K., Fu, Y., Han, B., Lybarger, K., Dobbins, N., Uzuner, O., & Yetisgen, M. (2023) · Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop · doi:10.18653/v1/2023.clinicalnlp-1.41 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
Streamline automated biomedical discoveries with agentic bioinformatics
Zhou, J., Jiang, J., Han, Z., Wang, Z., & Gao, X. (2025) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbaf505 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
“Recent studies have demonstrated that medical LLMs can produce clinically unsupported content with high linguistic fluency [48, 49].”
Meduri, K., Gonaygunta, H., Nadella, G. S., Pawar, P. P., & Kumar, D. (2024) · IJARCCE · doi:10.17148/ijarcce.2024.13114 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
Beyond Accuracy: Investigating Error Types in GPT-4 Responses to USMLE Questions
Roy, S., Khatua, A., Ghoochani, F., Hadler, U., Nejdl, W., & Ganguly, N. (2024) · Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · doi:10.1145/3626772.3657882 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
“Liévin et al. [21] investigated various chain-of-thought prompting techniques on GPT-3.”
BackgroundResultInfluentialSocrates, V., Wright, D. S., Huang, T., Fereydooni, S., Dien, C., Chi, L., Albano, J., Patterson, B., Sasidhar Kanaparthy, N., Wright, C. X., et al. (2025) · JMIR Aging · doi:10.2196/69504 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
Synoptic reporting by summarizing cancer pathology reports using large language models
Rajaganapathy, S., Chowdhury, S., Li, X., Buchner, V., He, Z., Zhang, R., Jiang, X., Yang, P., Cerhan, J. R., & Zong, N. (2025) · npj Health Systems · doi:10.1038/s44401-025-00013-8 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
“These key advantages have triggered studies on evaluating the effectiveness of LLMs in the clinical setting, such as clinical text annotation 24 , medical question and answering 26 , and reasoning in the medical domain 27 — which formessentialcomponentsofsynopticreporting.”
Han, T., Jeong, W. K., & Shin, J. (2025) · ULTRASONOGRAPHY · doi:10.14366/usg.25012 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
GPT-4 versus human authors in clinically complex MCQ creation: A blinded analysis of item quality
Wu, H., Zerner, T., Lee, D., Court‐Kowalski, S., Devitt, P. G., & Palmer, E. (2025) · Medical Teacher · doi:10.1080/0142159x.2025.2505122 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
“The most common flaws were an incorrect DOI, the reference being an old edition of a guideline, or incorrect details, as summarized in Table 7.”
Language model and its interpretability in biomedicine: A scoping review
Lyu, D., Wang, X., Chen, Y., & Wang, F. (2024) · iScience · doi:10.1016/j.isci.2024.109334 · Cited by 17 · see citing works
Kwan, H. Y., Shell, J., Fahy, C., Yang, S., & Xing, Y. (2025) · Systems · doi:10.3390/systems13040281 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
Classifying legal interpretations using large language models
Dugac, G., & Altwicker, T. (2025) · Artificial Intelligence and Law · doi:10.1007/s10506-025-09447-9 · Cited by 15 · see citing works
- Authors
- Liévin, V., Hother, C. E., Motzfeldt, A. G., & Winther, O.
- Affiliations
- Technical University of Denmark (DK)
- Copenhagen University Hospital (DK)
- University of Copenhagen (DK)
- Corresponding author
- Liévin, Valentin
- Venue
- Patterns
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2024-03
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 100943
- ISSN
- 2666-3899 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC10935498
- OpenAlex
- W4392359953
- Semantic Scholar
- d697b440dd0e65a05fe027e4c0ea85f62dcba033
- Cited by
- 343
- References
- 69
- Citations by year
- 2026: 95 · 2025: 108 · 2024: 79 · 2023: 60 · 2022: 1
- FWCI
- 26.42
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Patterns (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- Technical University of Denmark, DTU Orbit (Technical University of Denmark, DTU) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Danmarks Grundforskningsfond
- Novo Nordisk Fonden (NNF20OC0062606)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
- Keywords
- large language models, medical question answering, medical reasoning, chain-of-thought prompting, retrieval augmentation, few-shot prompting, prompt engineering, open-source language models, Llama 2, GPT-3.5, MedMCQA, PubMedQA
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Claims read by deepseek-v4.1-flash under definition version 3 (extract-v3) on 2026-10-07.
Classified by jev-1.13-20260917 (gold-guideline-v0.2) on 2026-10-07.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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