A Graph-Based Test-Harness for LLM Evaluation (2508.20810v1)

Abstract: We present a first known prototype of a dynamic, systematic benchmark of medical guidelines for 400+ questions, with 3.3+ trillion possible combinations, covering 100\% of guideline relationships. We transformed the WHO IMCI handbook into a directed graph with 200+ nodes (conditions, symptoms, treatments, follow-ups, severities) and 300+ edges, then used graph traversal to generate questions that incorporated age-specific scenarios and contextual distractors to ensure clinical relevance. Our graph-based approach enables systematic evaluation across clinical tasks (45-67\% accuracy), and we find models excel at symptom recognition but struggle with triaging severity, treatment protocols and follow-up care, demonstrating how customized benchmarks can identify specific capability gaps that general-domain evaluations miss. Beyond evaluation, this dynamic MCQA methodology enhances LLM post-training (supervised finetuning, GRPO, DPO), where correct answers provide high-reward samples without expensive human annotation. The graph-based approach successfully addresses the coverage limitations of manually curated benchmarks. This methodology is a step toward scalable, contamination-resistant solution for creating comprehensive benchmarks that can be dynamically generated, including when the guidelines are updated. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/jessicalundin/graph_testing_harness