PetQA: Benchmarking Veterinary Knowledge and Clinical Reasoning

Taegyun Kim, Youngwook Ham, Jungwook Rhim, Ju-Hyun An, Sungkyu Park, Kunwoo Park


Abstract
We introduce PetQA, a Korean long-form question-answering (QA) benchmark for evaluating veterinary knowledge and clinical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs). PetQA contains 10,076 text-only and 8,751 multimodal QA pairs derived from real-world questions about dogs and cats, paired with answers from expert veterinarians. Its test split, PetQA-Bench, further includes annotations for question types and clinical conditions. We evaluate eighteen models using ROUGE, BERTScore, and LLM-as-a-judge metrics for factuality and helpfulness under three settings: zero-shot inference, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The benchmarking results provide an overview of the strengths and limitations of current models in addressing veterinary clinical queries and highlight the need for more effective adaptation methods to develop clinically reliable AI systems for veterinary care. To facilitate broader use, we additionally provide translated versions of PetQA-Bench in five languages.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.2522
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
57338–57365
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2522/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Taegyun Kim, Youngwook Ham, Jungwook Rhim, Ju-Hyun An, Sungkyu Park, and Kunwoo Park. 2026. PetQA: Benchmarking Veterinary Knowledge and Clinical Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 57338–57365, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PetQA: Benchmarking Veterinary Knowledge and Clinical Reasoning (Kim et al., EMNLP 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2522.pdf