Akhilesh Magotra
2026
MedBench: Deliberative Evaluation of Medical Language Models
Pratik Jalan | Mukul Joshi | Akhilesh Magotra | Kshitij Jadhav
BioNLP 2026
Pratik Jalan | Mukul Joshi | Akhilesh Magotra | Kshitij Jadhav
BioNLP 2026
We introduce MedBench, a benchmark for evaluating medical language models as deliberating agents rather than isolated predictors. MedBench evaluates eight models (4B?32B) on 19,625 questions from six medical QA datasets using Consensus-Aware Model Panel (CAMP), a two-tier protocol in which five 4B?8B models answer independently, revise after observing peer reasoning, and escalate persistent disagreements to larger 20B?32B models. Compared with zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought baselines, CAMP shows that deliberation is not uniformly accuracy-improving, but reveals interaction-driven behaviors hidden by single-model evaluation. On PubMedQA without external context, the 4B?8B panel outperforms the evaluated 20B?32B individual zero-shot models (54.1% vs. 33.9%), and achieves the best evaluated result with context (75.7%), suggesting that structured interaction can sometimes complement scale. Across five datasets, initial inter-model agreement is positively associated with correctness and serves as a useful difficulty signal. However, on MedXpertQA, unanimous agreement yields only 6.6% accuracy despite 14.4% overall accuracy, suggesting correlated ignorance, where shared biases make consensus misleading. Error analysis shows that most failures are debate-insufficient cases, where incorrect majorities persist despite interaction (93?97%), while debate-harmful cases account for 3?7%. MedBench positions deliberative evaluation as a complement to accuracy-centric benchmarking, measuring when model interaction corrects errors, reinforces shared mistakes, or signals the need for stronger evidence and human review.