Med-CoReasoner: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gao, Fan, Tong, Sherry T., Sohn, Jiwoong, Huang, Jiahao, Jiang, Junfeng, Xia, Ding, Ittichaiwong, Piyalitt, Veerakanjana, Kanyakorn, Kim, Hyunjae, Chen, Qingyu, Taylor, Edison Marrese, Kobayashi, Kazuma, Aizawa, Akiko, Li, Irene
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913162145562624
author Gao, Fan
Tong, Sherry T.
Sohn, Jiwoong
Huang, Jiahao
Jiang, Junfeng
Xia, Ding
Ittichaiwong, Piyalitt
Veerakanjana, Kanyakorn
Kim, Hyunjae
Chen, Qingyu
Taylor, Edison Marrese
Kobayashi, Kazuma
Aizawa, Akiko
Li, Irene
author_facet Gao, Fan
Tong, Sherry T.
Sohn, Jiwoong
Huang, Jiahao
Jiang, Junfeng
Xia, Ding
Ittichaiwong, Piyalitt
Veerakanjana, Kanyakorn
Kim, Hyunjae
Chen, Qingyu
Taylor, Edison Marrese
Kobayashi, Kazuma
Aizawa, Akiko
Li, Irene
contents While reasoning-enhanced large language models perform strongly on English medical tasks, a persistent multilingual gap remains, with substantially weaker reasoning in local languages, limiting equitable global medical deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Med-CoReasoner, a language-informed co-reasoning framework that elicits parallel English and local-language reasoning, abstracts them into structured concepts, and integrates local clinical knowledge into an English logical scaffold via concept-level alignment and retrieval. This design combines the structural robustness of English reasoning with the practice-grounded expertise encoded in local languages. To evaluate multilingual medical reasoning beyond multiple-choice settings, we construct MultiMed-X, a benchmark covering seven languages with expert-annotated long-form question answering and natural language inference tasks, comprising 350 instances per language. Experiments across three benchmarks show that Med-CoReasoner improves multilingual reasoning performance by an average of 5%, with particularly substantial gains in low-resource languages. Moreover, model distillation and expert evaluation analysis further confirm that Med-CoReasoner produces clinically sound and culturally grounded reasoning traces.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_08267
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Med-CoReasoner: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning
Gao, Fan
Tong, Sherry T.
Sohn, Jiwoong
Huang, Jiahao
Jiang, Junfeng
Xia, Ding
Ittichaiwong, Piyalitt
Veerakanjana, Kanyakorn
Kim, Hyunjae
Chen, Qingyu
Taylor, Edison Marrese
Kobayashi, Kazuma
Aizawa, Akiko
Li, Irene
Computation and Language
While reasoning-enhanced large language models perform strongly on English medical tasks, a persistent multilingual gap remains, with substantially weaker reasoning in local languages, limiting equitable global medical deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Med-CoReasoner, a language-informed co-reasoning framework that elicits parallel English and local-language reasoning, abstracts them into structured concepts, and integrates local clinical knowledge into an English logical scaffold via concept-level alignment and retrieval. This design combines the structural robustness of English reasoning with the practice-grounded expertise encoded in local languages. To evaluate multilingual medical reasoning beyond multiple-choice settings, we construct MultiMed-X, a benchmark covering seven languages with expert-annotated long-form question answering and natural language inference tasks, comprising 350 instances per language. Experiments across three benchmarks show that Med-CoReasoner improves multilingual reasoning performance by an average of 5%, with particularly substantial gains in low-resource languages. Moreover, model distillation and expert evaluation analysis further confirm that Med-CoReasoner produces clinically sound and culturally grounded reasoning traces.
title Med-CoReasoner: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08267