What's in a Name? Morphological Shortcuts by LLMs in Pharmacology
Researchers have identified that large language models can be misled by the morphological structure of drug names, leading to inaccurate pharmacological reasoning. By using fictitious drug names with real affixes, the study demonstrated that models often infer drug properties based solely on these word parts. A new framework applied to over 600 drugs revealed that models frequently rely on affix cues without explicit indication, sometimes causing them to confuse properties of drugs with similar affixes, posing a subtle risk to safety. AI
IMPACT Identifies a subtle risk in LLM reasoning that could impact high-stakes applications like medicine.