mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Retrieval-Augmented Agentic Rubric Generation for Reliable Medical Response Evaluation

arXiv 2601.15161 ↗First posted 21 Jan 2026cs.CL cs.AIcited by 4

On the map: Retrieval-augmented generation → Medical and biomedical RAG

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Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical decision support, where hallucinations and unsafe suggestions may pose direct risks to patient safety. These risks are hard to assess: subtle clinical errors are often missed by generic metrics and LLM judges using general criteria, while expert-authored fine-grained rubrics are expensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-augmented multi-agent framework for automatically generating instance-specific evaluation rubrics. Our approach grounds evaluation in authoritative medical evidence by decomposing retrieved content into atomic facts and synthesizing them with user interaction constraints to form fine-grained evaluation criteria. Evaluated on HealthBench and LLMEval-Med, our framework achieves Clinical Intent Alignment (CIA) scores of 50.20% and 31.90%, significantly outperforming the GPT-4o baseline and showing consistent improvements across English and Chinese medical benchmarks. In discriminative tests on HealthBench, our rubrics achieve a 7.8% point higher win rate than GPT-4o and increase the mean score difference from 4.972 to 8.658. Ablation studies further show that individual components contribute differently across datasets, with interaction-intent modeling providing the most consistent contribution to clinical-criterion coverage. Beyond evaluation, our rubrics guide response refinement, improving response quality by 9.2%. These results suggest that automated, knowledge-grounded rubric generation provides a scalable foundation for evaluating and improving medical LLMs. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Automated-Rubric-Generation-E716/.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical and biomedical RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation. Builds on 22 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

Builds on

22 of 43 references.

References · 22

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10 more
  1. 2025HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Healthcited by 429
  2. 2023MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoningcited by 316
  3. 2024Judging the Judges: A Systematic Study of Position Bias in LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 269
  4. 2024MiniCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of LLMs on Grounding Documentscited by 257
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

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  1. 2026RubricsTree: Scalable and Evolving Open-Ended Evaluation of Personal Health Agents across Health Memory and Medical Skills
  2. 2026BLUEmed: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Debate for Clinical Error Detection
  3. 2026A rubric-based controlled comparison of frontier language models on expert-authored clinical reasoning tasks
  4. 2026From Conflict to Consensus: Boosting Medical Reasoning via Multi-Round Agentic RAG
  5. 2024Towards Automatic Evaluation for LLMs' Clinical Capabilities: Metric, Data, and Algorithm
  6. 2026A Proposed Rubric for Evaluating Expressed Clinical Reasoning in Large Language Model Responses
  7. 2025OpenAIs HealthBench in Action: Evaluating an LLM-Based Medical Assistant on Realistic Clinical Queries
  8. 2026Agentic AI in medicine: architectures, applications, evaluation, and challenges for clinical translation