paper-with-me

Papers

Evaluating the performance and fragility of large language models on the self-assessment for neurological surgeons

2025-05-29 · Krithik Vishwanath, Anton Alyakin, Mrigayu Ghosh, Jin Vivian Lee, Daniel Alexander Alber, Karl L. Sangwon, Douglas Kondziolka, Eric Karl Oermann

The Congress of Neurological Surgeons Self-Assessment for Neurological Surgeons (CNS-SANS) questions are widely used by neurosurgical residents to prepare for written board examinations. Recently, these questions have also served as benchmarks for evaluating large language models' (LLMs) neurosurgical knowledge. This study aims to assess the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs on neurosurgery board-like questions and to evaluate their robustness to the inclusion of distractor statements. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted using 28 large language models. These models were tested on 2,904 neurosurgery board examination questions derived from the CNS-SANS. Additionally, the study introduced a distraction framework to assess the fragility of these models. The framework incorporated simple, irrelevant distractor statements containing polysemous words with clinical meanings used in non-clinical contexts to determine the extent to which such distractions degrade model performance on standard medical benchmarks. 6 of the 28 tested LLMs achieved board-passing outcomes, with the top-performing models scoring over 15.7% above the passing threshold. When exposed to distractions, accuracy across various model architectures was significantly reduced-by as much as 20.4%-with one model failing that had previously passed. Both general-purpose and medical open-source models experienced greater performance declines compared to proprietary variants when subjected to the added distractors. While current LLMs demonstrate an impressive ability to answer neurosurgery board-like exam questions, their performance is markedly vulnerable to extraneous, distracting information. These findings underscore the critical need for developing novel mitigation strategies aimed at bolstering LLM resilience against in-text distractions, particularly for safe and effective clinical deployment.

📄 PDF Abstract BibTeX arXiv:2505.23477

Code (0)

등록된 구현이 없습니다.

Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반

Evaluating Semantic Fragility in Text-to-Audio Generation Systems Under Controlled Prompt Perturbations

2026-03-14 · Jiahui Wu arxiv

Recent advances in text-to-audio generation enable models to translate natural-language descriptions into diverse musical output. However, the robustness of these systems under semantically equivalent prompt variations r…

Semantic SimilarityAudio Generation

Skin-Deep: A Geometric Diagnostic for Alignment Fragility in Large Language Model Representations

2026-06-21 · Dongyub Jude Lee, Jungseob Lee, Seungyoon Lee, Seongtae Hong 외 arxiv

Alignment tuning is meant to make harmful-request refusal robust, yet this safety behavior can be erased by a small set of benign fine-tuning examples. This is a deployment risk for open-weight models because a checkpoin…

On the Fragility of Self-Improving Agents: Variance, Task Order, and Underspecification

2026-08-18 · Qinyuan Ye, Yu Li, Yada Pruksachatkun, Jiaxin Zhang 외 arxiv

Memory-based self-improving agents--those that learn from an online stream of tasks and improve over time by maintaining a textual memory bank--have shown great promise in recent literature. However, the reliability aspe…

Not All Errors Are Created Equal: ASCoT Addresses Late-Stage Fragility in Efficient LLM Reasoning

2025-08-07 · Dongxu Zhang, Yujun Wu, Yiding Sun, Jinnan Yang 외 arxiv

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting empowers Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring reasoning reliability remains an open challenge. Contrary to the prevailing cascading failure hypothesis which posits that early erro…

Multi-Perspective Consistency Enhances Confidence Estimation in Large Language Models

2024-02-17 · Pei Wang, Yejie Wang, Muxi Diao, Keqing He 외

In the deployment of large language models (LLMs), accurate confidence estimation is critical for assessing the credibility of model predictions. However, existing methods often fail to overcome the issue of overconfiden…