# Identifying Evidence-Based Nudges in Biomedical Literature with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10345/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05579/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Struggle to Learn Long-Tail Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08411/) (2022)
- [OpenScholar: Synthesizing Scientific Literature with Retrieval-augmented LMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14199/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a scalable, AI-powered system that identifies and extracts evidence-based behavioral nudges from unstructured biomedical literature. Nudges are subtle, non-coercive interventions that influence behavior without limiting choice, showing strong impact on health outcomes like medication adherence. However, identifying these interventions from PubMed's 8 million+ articles is a bottleneck. Our system uses a novel multi-stage pipeline: first, hybrid filtering (keywords, TF-IDF, cosine similarity, and a "nudge-term bonus") reduces the corpus to about 81,000 candidates. Second, we use OpenScholar (quantized LLaMA 3.1 8B) to classify papers and extract structured fields like nudge type and target behavior in a single pass, validated against a JSON schema. We evaluated four configurations on a labeled test set (N=197). The best setup (Title/Abstract/Intro) achieved a 67.0% F1 score and 72.0% recall, ideal for discovery. A high-precision variant using self-consistency (7 randomized passes) achieved 100% precision with 12% recall, demonstrating a tunable trade-off for high-trust use cases. This system is being integrated into Agile Nudge+, a real-world platform, to ground LLM-generated interventions in peer-reviewed evidence. This work demonstrates interpretable, domain-specific retrieval pipelines for evidence synthesis and personalized healthcare.