CANDI: Contextual Alignment for Niche Domains Question Answering

Abstract: The deployment of LLMs in specialized domains like medical diagnostics and financial advisory necessitates evaluating capabilities beyond general knowledge. Traditional question-answering benchmarks often fail to capture the nuanced contextual grounding, user awareness, and domain understanding these fields require. To address this, we introduce CANDI-QA (Contextual Alignment for Niche Domains Question Answering), a novel dataset evaluating LLMs on delivering accurate, context-sensitive, and user-aligned answers in specialized settings. CANDI-QA features expert-curated question-answer pairs structured into two categories: (1) Information Assistance Questions, which are direct, factual queries requiring precise extraction, and (2) Applied Inference Questions, which are multi-hop reasoning tasks needing situational inference to generate actionable insights. We evaluate over ten diverse LLMs, from compact open-source to state-of-the-art proprietary systems. As a robust baseline, we present MTSS-Net, a lightweight neuro-symbolic framework combining neural retrieval with rule-based reasoning. Our findings highlight the profound challenges of achieving contextual alignment in niche domains, revealing the limitations of current LLMs without enhanced contextual or symbolic integration. Ultimately, CANDI-QA serves as a critical benchmark for advancing research in context-aware LLMs, stimulating the development of robust, trustworthy AI for high-stakes domains.