Med-R$^2$: Crafting Trustworthy LLM Physicians via Retrieval and Reasoning of Evidence-Based Medicine

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lu, Keer, Liang, Zheng, Pan, Da, Zhang, Shusen, Dong, Guosheng, Wu, Zhonghai, Leng, Huang, Cui, Bin, Zhang, Wentao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lu, Keer
Liang, Zheng
Pan, Da
Zhang, Shusen
Dong, Guosheng
Wu, Zhonghai
Leng, Huang
Cui, Bin
Zhang, Wentao
author_facet Lu, Keer
Liang, Zheng
Pan, Da
Zhang, Shusen
Dong, Guosheng
Wu, Zhonghai
Leng, Huang
Cui, Bin
Zhang, Wentao
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in clinical scenarios. Despite their potential, existing works face challenges when applying LLMs to medical settings. Strategies relying on training with medical datasets are highly cost-intensive and may suffer from outdated training data. Leveraging external knowledge bases is a suitable alternative, yet it faces obstacles such as limited retrieval precision and poor effectiveness in answer extraction. These issues collectively prevent LLMs from demonstrating the expected level of proficiency in mastering medical expertise. To address these challenges, we introduce Med-R^2, a novel LLM physician framework that adheres to the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) process, efficiently integrating retrieval mechanisms as well as the selection and reasoning processes of evidence, thereby enhancing the problem-solving capabilities of LLMs in healthcare scenarios and fostering a trustworthy LLM physician. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that Med-R^2 achieves a 13.27\% improvement over vanilla RAG methods and even a 4.55\% enhancement compared to fine-tuning strategies, without incurring additional training costs. Furthermore, we find that our LLaMA3.1-70B + Med-R$^2$ surpasses frontier models, including GPT-4o, Claude3.5-Sonnet and DeepSeek-V3 by 1.05\%, 6.14\% and 1.91\%. Med-R$^2$ effectively enhances the capabilities of LLMs in the medical domain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_11885
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Med-R$^2$: Crafting Trustworthy LLM Physicians via Retrieval and Reasoning of Evidence-Based Medicine
Lu, Keer
Liang, Zheng
Pan, Da
Zhang, Shusen
Dong, Guosheng
Wu, Zhonghai
Leng, Huang
Cui, Bin
Zhang, Wentao
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in clinical scenarios. Despite their potential, existing works face challenges when applying LLMs to medical settings. Strategies relying on training with medical datasets are highly cost-intensive and may suffer from outdated training data. Leveraging external knowledge bases is a suitable alternative, yet it faces obstacles such as limited retrieval precision and poor effectiveness in answer extraction. These issues collectively prevent LLMs from demonstrating the expected level of proficiency in mastering medical expertise. To address these challenges, we introduce Med-R^2, a novel LLM physician framework that adheres to the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) process, efficiently integrating retrieval mechanisms as well as the selection and reasoning processes of evidence, thereby enhancing the problem-solving capabilities of LLMs in healthcare scenarios and fostering a trustworthy LLM physician. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that Med-R^2 achieves a 13.27\% improvement over vanilla RAG methods and even a 4.55\% enhancement compared to fine-tuning strategies, without incurring additional training costs. Furthermore, we find that our LLaMA3.1-70B + Med-R$^2$ surpasses frontier models, including GPT-4o, Claude3.5-Sonnet and DeepSeek-V3 by 1.05\%, 6.14\% and 1.91\%. Med-R$^2$ effectively enhances the capabilities of LLMs in the medical domain.
title Med-R$^2$: Crafting Trustworthy LLM Physicians via Retrieval and Reasoning of Evidence-Based Medicine
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11885