arXiv subjects

Guo Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Guo Zhu.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MedEasy: Designing AI Standardized Patients for Clinical Consultation Training

AI standardized patients are becoming a setting for professional training in clinical consultation. This paper presents MedEasy, a multi-agent system that organizes virtual-patient practice through patient dialogue, clinical actions, decision submission, documentation, and feedback. We first conducted a formative study with 12 clinical-year medical students through interviews and three co-design workshops. The findings informed a staged workflow, structured case records, action-contingent findings, and trajectory-based review. We then conducted an evaluative user study with a separate cohort of 12 clinical-year medical students, with each participant completing two counterbalanced cases. Learners interpreted MedEasy as a connected consultation environment. They used patient responses, examination findings, available actions, and feedback together to judge whether the represented case remained coherent. They valued repeatable practice and recorded review, while questioning missing actions and feedback criteria. The paper contributes design implications for AI-supported professional training systems that use case-specific standards to connect situated practice.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

"It Talks Like a Patient, But Feels Different": Co-Designing AI Standardized Patients with Medical Learners

Standardized patients (SPs) play a central role in clinical communication training but are costly, difficult to scale, and inconsistent. Large language model (LLM) based AI standardized patients (AI-SPs) promise flexible, on-demand practice, yet learners often report that they talk like a patient but feel different. We interviewed 12 clinical-year medical students and conducted three co-design workshops to examine how learners experience constraints of SP encounters and what they expect from AI-SPs. We identified six learner-centered needs, translated them into AI-SP design requirements, and synthesized a conceptual workflow. Our findings position AI-SPs as tools for deliberate practice and show that instructional usability, rather than conversational realism alone, drives learner trust, engagement, and educational value.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

MTalk-Bench: Evaluating Speech-to-Speech Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues via Arena-style and Rubrics Protocols

The rapid advancement of speech-to-speech (S2S) large language models (LLMs) has significantly improved real-time spoken interaction. However, current evaluation frameworks remain inadequate for assessing performance in complex, multi-turn dialogues. To address this, we introduce MTalk-Bench, a multi-turn S2S benchmark covering three core dimensions: Semantic Information, Paralinguistic Information, and Ambient Sound. Each dimension includes nine realistic scenarios, along with targeted tasks to assess specific capabilities such as reasoning. Our dual-method evaluation framework combines Arena-style evaluation (pairwise comparison) and Rubrics-based evaluation (absolute scoring) for relative and absolute assessment. The benchmark includes both model and human outputs, evaluated by human evaluators and LLMs. Experimental results reveal two sets of findings. Overall performance of S2S LLMs: (1) models excel at semantic information processing yet underperform on paralinguistic information and ambient sounds perception; (2) models typically regain coherence by increasing response length, sacrificing efficiency in multi-turn dialogues; (3) modality-aware, task-specific designs outperform brute scaling. Evaluation framework and reliability: (1) Arena and Rubrics yield consistent, complementary rankings, but reliable distinctions emerge only when performance gaps are large; (2) LLM-as-a-judge aligns with humans when gaps are clear or criteria explicit, but exhibits position and length biases and is reliable on nonverbal evaluation only with text annotations. These results highlight current limitations in S2S evaluation and the need for more robust, speech-aware assessment frameworks.

cs.CL↗