Cited by 43Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and EducationMultimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsTopic Modeling

MedBench: A Large-Scale Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Medical Large Language Models

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Cai, Yan, Wang, Linlin, Wang, Ye, De Melo, Gerard, Zhang, Ya, Wang, Yanfeng, He, Liang·2024·Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The emergence of various medical large language models (LLMs) in the medical domain has highlighted the need for unified evaluation standards, as manual evaluation of LLMs proves to be time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, we introduce MedBench, a comprehensive benchmark for the Chinese medical domain, comprising 40,041 questions sourced from authentic examination exercises and medical reports of diverse branches of medicine. In particular, this benchmark is composed of four key components: the Chinese Medical Licensing Examination, the Resident Standardization Training Examination, the Doctor In-Charge Qualification Examination, and real-world clinic cases encompassing examinations, diagnoses, and treatments. MedBench replicates the educational progression and clinical practice experiences of doctors in Mainland China, thereby establish- ing itself as a credible benchmark for assessing the mastery of knowledge and reasoning abilities in medical language learning models. We perform extensive experiments and conduct an in-depth analysis from diverse perspectives, which culminate in the following findings: (1) Chinese medical LLMs underperform on this benchmark, highlighting the need for significant advances in clinical knowledge and diagnostic precision. (2) Several general-domain LLMs surprisingly possess considerable medical knowledge. These findings elucidate both the capabilities and limitations of LLMs within the context of MedBench, with the ultimate goal of aiding the medical research community.

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  • Large-scale medical benchmarks often comprise tens of thousands of multiple-choice questions, leading to substantial token consumption and API costs, particularly for proprietary models.

    “Large-scale medical benchmarks often comprise tens of thousands of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) (e.g., MedQA: 12,723 items2; MedMCQA: 6,150 items9; MedBench: 40,041 items4; Med-HALT: 59,254 items10), leading to substantial token consumption and API costs—particularly for proprietary models.”

    From Leveraging computerized adaptive testing for cost-effective evaluation of large language models in medical benchmarking (2026) · cites this paper as [4]

    The Proposed Benchmark (page unavailable) identifies MedBench as containing 40,041 exercises, including a large multiple-choice examination component, but 1,025 of the exercises are clinical-case question–answer pairs rather than MCQs. Quantitative Analysis (page unavailable) reports high computational cost when using an API for a benchmark of this size. The paper does not specifically discuss token consumption or say that the cost is particularly high for proprietary models. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Current practice for evaluating LLMs in healthcare relies heavily on static, fixed-length benchmarks such as MedQA, MMLU-Med, and MedBench.

    “Current practice relies heavily on static, fixed-length benchmarks such as, MedQA2, MMLU-Med3, and MedBench4.”

    From Leveraging computerized adaptive testing for cost-effective evaluation of large language models in medical benchmarking (2026) · cites this paper as [4]

    The Proposed Benchmark section identifies MedBench as a defined set of 40,041 medical questions, supporting its use as an example of a medical LLM benchmark. But the Quantitative Analysis section proposes evaluating models on a smaller set of questions selected by difficulty, so the paper does not establish that MedBench evaluation is necessarily fixed-length. (LLM, conf=0.78)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • These frameworks typically focus on narrow clinical scenarios (1-28 datasets), rely on limited data sources or synthetic data, and assess primarily accuracy without comprehensive taxonomy validation or deployment considerations.

    “However, these frameworks typically focus on narrow clinical scenarios (1–28 datasets), rely on limited data sources or synthetic data, and assess primarily accuracy without comprehensive taxonomy validation or deployment considerations.”

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Authors
Cai, Y., Wang, L., Wang, Y., De Melo, G., Zhang, Y., Wang, Y., & He, L.
Affiliations
  • East China Normal University (CN)
  • Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CN)
  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)
Venue
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Published
2024-03-24
Volume
38
Issue
16
Pages
17709-17717
ISSN
  • 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
  • 2374-3468
OpenAlex
W4393156546
Cited by
42
References
28
Citations by year
2026: 15 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 5
FWCI
11.29
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
other-oa
Locations
  • Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (12105105)
  • East China Normal University
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
Keywords
medical large language models, benchmark, clinical reasoning, diagnostic accuracy, medical education

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