MCQG-SRefine: Multiple Choice Question Generation and Evaluation with Iterative Self-Critique, Correction, and Comparison Feedback
Abstract
Automatic question generation (QG) is essential for AI and NLP, particularly in intelligent tutoring, dialogue systems, and fact verification. Generating multiple-choice questions (MCQG) for professional exams, like the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), is particularly challenging, requiring domain expertise and complex multi-hop reasoning for high-quality questions. However, current large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 struggle with professional MCQG due to outdated knowledge, hallucination issues, and prompt sensitivity, resulting in unsatisfactory quality and difficulty. To address these challenges, we propose MCQG-SRefine, an LLM self-refine-based (Critique and Correction) framework for converting medical cases into high-quality USMLE-style questions. By integrating expert-driven prompt engineering with iterative self-critique and self-correction feedback, MCQG-SRefine significantly enhances human expert satisfaction regarding both the quality and difficulty of the questions. Furthermore, we introduce an LLM-as-Judge-based automatic metric to replace the complex and costly expert evaluation process, ensuring reliable and expert-aligned assessments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2410.13191,
title = {MCQG-SRefine: Multiple Choice Question Generation and Evaluation with Iterative Self-Critique, Correction, and Comparison Feedback},
author = {Zonghai Yao and Aditya Parashar and Huixue Zhou and Won Seok Jang and Feiyun Ouyang and Zhichao Yang and Hong Yu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.13191},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Equal contribution for the first two authors. To appear in proceedings of the Main Conference on 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). Keywords: Question Generation, USMLE, Self-Refine, Self-Critique, and Self-Correction, LLM-as-Judge, AI for Medical Education