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Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
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Adversarial Pressure and Metacognitive Control Failure in Clinical LLMs: A Multi-Domain Benchmark Study

Authors: IFEDILI, CHIJIOKE;

Adversarial Pressure and Metacognitive Control Failure in Clinical LLMs: A Multi-Domain Benchmark Study

Abstract

Background: Clinical large language models (LLMs) face adversarial pressure in real-world practice — physician authority language, time urgency, assumption injection, social consensus claims, and protocol waivers all pressure systems toward action despite missing safety-critical data. Whether LLMs maintain metacognitive control under such pressure remains unstudied. Objective: To benchmark adversarial robustness of metacognitive control across four LLMs and three clinical domains using a structured pressure taxonomy derived from clinical pharmacy practice. Methods: We constructed a 60-case adversarial benchmark spanning QT-interval risk, anticoagulation dosing, and controlled substance dispensing. Five pressure categories were systematically injected into cases with missing required inputs (gold label: DEFER for all). Four LLMs were evaluated: GPT-4o-mini (OpenAI), Mistral-7B-Instruct (Mistral AI), Llama-2-7b-chat (Meta), and Gemma-2-2b-it (Google). Metrics: accuracy (deferral rate), unsafe action rate, and awareness rate. Results: GPT-4o-mini achieved 95.0% accuracy with 0% unsafe actions across all pressure types and domains. Mistral-7B achieved 86.7% accuracy with 8.3% unsafe rate. Llama-2-7B achieved 70.0% with 11.7% unsafe rate. Gemma-2 achieved 55.0% with 41.7% unsafe rate. Authority override produced the highest unsafe rate in Gemma-2 (58.3%); urgency pressure produced 50.0%. QT risk under Gemma-2 reached 65% unsafe — the highest domain-specific rate observed. Implications: Conservative deferral bias, often characterized as a failure in standard benchmarks, is a safety asset under adversarial conditions. Metacognitive robustness under pressure should be a standard evaluation criterion for clinical AI deployment.

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
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