Arjun Krishna
2026
MedAct: Removing the Human Bottleneck in Benchmarking Clinical LLM Safety
Arjun Krishna | Brian Pridgen | Max Silverstein
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM)
Arjun Krishna | Brian Pridgen | Max Silverstein
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM)
Most medical benchmarks for large language models test factual recall through multiple-choice questions, but on-the-ground physicians do not have the luxury of four options to choose from. NOHARM (Wu et al., 2025) demonstrated this limitation using 100 real eConsult cases annotated by 29 board-certified physicians, showing that action-level evaluation reveals omission and commission failure modes invisible to multiple-choice tests. However, NOHARM’s cases are closed and their creation required substantial expert physician time, creating a human bottleneck that limits the scalability and openness of this evaluation approach. We present MedAct, an open replication of NOHARM’s evaluation methodology using synthetically generated cases. Our contribution is a multi-stage generation pipeline that uses language models grounded in clinical practice guidelines to produce 100 cases across ten specialties, each containing roughly 50 plausible next-step actions labeled as Appropriate or Inappropriate using NOHARM’sscoring framework. The pipeline includes structural quality controls: 83 of 100 cases pass all five automated checks, and answer-leaking language appears in only 0.06% of actions. In a pilot evaluation of nine contemporary LLMs using this synthetic benchmark, we observe patterns consistent with NOHARM’s findings on human-curated cases, including that omissions dominate error volume while commissions dominate severe errors. We release all cases, rubrics, generation tooling, and scoring code openly, removing the human-bottleneck barrier to action-level clinical LLM evaluation.
2025
Weakest Link in the Chain: Security Vulnerabilities in Advanced Reasoning Models
Arjun Krishna | Erick Galinkin | Aaditya Rastogi
Proceedings of the The First Workshop on LLM Security (LLMSEC)
Arjun Krishna | Erick Galinkin | Aaditya Rastogi
Proceedings of the The First Workshop on LLM Security (LLMSEC)
The introduction of advanced reasoning capabilities have improved the problem-solving performance of large language models, particularly on math and coding benchmarks. However, it remains unclear whether these reasoning models are more or less vulnerable to adversarial prompt attacks than their non-reasoning counterparts. In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of weaknesses in advanced reasoning models compared to similar non-reasoning models across a diverse set of prompt-based attack categories. Using experimental data, we find that on average the reasoning-augmented models are slightly more robust than non-reasoning models (42.51% vs 45.53% attack success rate, lower is better). However, this overall trend masks significant category-specific differences: for certain attack types the reasoning models are substantially more vulnerable (e.g., up to 32 percentage points worse on a tree-of-attacks prompt), while for others they are markedly more robust (e.g., 29.8 points better on cross-site scripting injection). Our findings highlight the nuanced security implications of advanced reasoning in language models and emphasize the importance of stress-testing safety across diverse adversarial techniques.