ReMedQA

This repository hosts the ReMedQA dataset, introduced in our paper: "ReMedQA: Are We Done With Medical Multiple-Choice Benchmarks?"

Overview

While medical multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) benchmarks often report near-human accuracy, raw accuracy alone does not reliably measure a model’s true competence. Models may change answers under minor perturbations, exposing fragility and lack of robustness.

ReMedQA addresses this limitation by extending standard medical MCQA datasets—MedQA, MedMCQA, and MMLU-med—with:

• Open-answer variants (Open setting)
• MCQA systematically perturbed items (Closed setting)

Building on this design, we introduce ReAcc and ReCon, two reliability-oriented metrics. ReAcc captures the proportion of questions answered correctly across all variations (i.e., open and closed settings), whereas ReCon measures answer consistency across variations regardless of correctness.

By jointly tracking accuracy and consistency, our metrics elevate reliability to a core dimension of evaluation—broadly applicable, yet critical in the medical domain.

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📊 Dataset Structure

The dataset is organized into the following medical subsets, along with their sizes and available pertubation modes:

Subset	# Samples	Available Modes
medqa	1,259	mcq, open, incorrect, roman_numeral, none_of_the_provided, fixed_pos, no_symbols
medmcqa	1,000	mcq, open, incorrect, roman_numeral, none_of_the_provided, fixed_pos, no_symbols
mmlu	895	mcq, open, incorrect, roman_numeral, none_of_the_provided, fixed_pos, no_symbols

Note: For mmlu, only the following medical subjects were included: clinical knowledge, medical genetics, anatomy, professional medicine, college biology, and college medicine.

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Available Perturbation Modes

Mode	Description
mcq (Standard)	Standard multiple-choice question format
open	Open-ended reformulation via GPT-4.1
incorrect (Select Incorrect)	The final answer must correspond to the three incorrect options instead of the gold one
roman_numeral	Options labeled with Roman numerals (I, II, etc.) instead of letters
none_of_the_provided	Replace gold answer with "None of the provided" option
fixed_pos (Fixed Position)	Answer is always fixed to a specific position (e.g., always D)
no_symbols (No Labels)	Options presented without symbols like "(A)" or "(I)"

Features

Feature	Type	Description
id	string	Unique identifier
question	string	The medical MCQA question
options	string	Answer options
answer	string	Correct option label (e.g., A)
prompt	string	User's prompt text formatted for non-reasoning model
prompt_think	string	User's prompt text formatted for reasoning model

Loading the Dataset

from datasets import load_dataset
# Load the full dataset
ds = load_dataset("disi-unibo-nlp/ReMedQA")
# Access a specific subset and perturbation mode, e.g. MedQA with open-ended format
medqa_open = ds["medqa_open"]
# Check a sample
print(medqa_open[0])

The output will be like this:

{
   'id': '0000',
   'question': 'A junior orthopaedic surgery resident is completing a carpal tunnel repair with the department chairman as the attending physician. During the case, the resident inadvertently cuts a flexor tendon. The tendon is repaired without complication. The attending tells the resident that the patient will do fine, and there is no need to report this minor complication that will not harm the patient, as he does not want to make the patient worry unnecessarily. He tells the resident to leave this complication out of the operative report. What is the correct next action for the resident to take?',
   'options': "{'A': 'Disclose the error to the patient and put it in the operative report', 'B': 'Tell the attending that he cannot fail to disclose this mistake', 'C': 'Report the physician to the ethics committee', 'D': 'Refuse to dictate the operative report'}",
   'answer': 'Tell the attending that he cannot fail to disclose this mistake',
   'prompt': 'The following are open-ended questions about medical knowledge.\nSolve them in a step-by-step fashion, starting by summarizing the available information.\nOutput a single, concise final answer (not a letter).\nQuestion: "A junior orthopaedic surgery resident is completing a carpal tunnel repair with the department chairman as the attending physician. During the case, the resident inadvertently cuts a flexor tendon. The tendon is repaired without complication. The attending tells the resident that the patient will do fine, and there is no need to report this minor complication that will not harm the patient, as he does not want to make the patient worry unnecessarily. He tells the resident to leave this complication out of the operative report. What is the correct next action for the resident to take?"\n\nResponse (think step by step and then end with "Final Answer:" followed by *only* the concise answer)',
   'prompt_think': 'You are given an open-ended question about medical knowledge. Answer by returning a concise answer. \nQuestion: "A junior orthopaedic surgery resident is completing a carpal tunnel repair with the department chairman as the attending physician. During the case, the resident inadvertently cuts a flexor tendon. The tendon is repaired without complication. The attending tells the resident that the patient will do fine, and there is no need to report this minor complication that will not harm the patient, as he does not want to make the patient worry unnecessarily. He tells the resident to leave this complication out of the operative report. What is the correct next action for the resident to take?"\n\nAfter you have finished your thinking process, please show your response with **only** the concise final answer, e.g., "Final Answer: <your concise answer>".\n'
}

Results

Overall Perfomance

The Figure below shows model performance on ReMedQA, comparing open-ended responses with all MCQA perturbation variants and reporting the averaged reliability metrics (ReAcc and ReCon) across datasets.

📬 Contact

For questions, feedback, or collaborations, feel free to reach out:

• Alessio Cocchieri — a.cocchieri@unibo.it
• Luca Ragazzi — l.ragazzi@unibo.it

📖 Citation

If you use ReMedQA in your research, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{cocchieri-etal-2026-remedqa,
    title = {ReMedQA: Are We Done With Medical Multiple-Choice Benchmarks?},
    author = {Cocchieri, Alessio and
              Ragazzi, Luca and
              Tagliavini, Giuseppe and
              Moro, Gianluca},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
    month = mar,
    year = {2026},
    address = {Rabat, Morocco},
    publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}
}