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Hauptverfasser: Gao, Yicheng, Zhou, Xiaolin, Li, Yahan, Zhao, Yue, Liu, Ruishan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07058
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author Gao, Yicheng
Zhou, Xiaolin
Li, Yahan
Zhao, Yue
Liu, Ruishan
author_facet Gao, Yicheng
Zhou, Xiaolin
Li, Yahan
Zhao, Yue
Liu, Ruishan
contents Real-world clinical diagnosis is a complex process in which the doctor is required to obtain information from both interaction with the patient and conducting medical exams. Additionally, the doctor needs to adapt to different patient personas, as well as noisy and incomplete information that can happen at any time during the process. However, existing benchmarks for medical LLMs and methods for automatic diagnosis largely simplify this process by reducing it to single-turn question answering, noise-free conversations, or sequential exam making, etc., ignoring the interactive and uncertain nature of clinical diagnosis. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by formalizing clinical diagnosis as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) with three action types: questioning the patient, ordering medical exams as tool calls, and issuing a diagnosis. We also introduce a systematic noise model comprising seven patient noise types and three exam noise types. Using our proposed environment, we train an effective diagnosis agent, \textbf{MedExAgent}, through a two-stage pipeline that first performs supervised finetuning on synthetic conversations structured after the Calgary-Cambridge model for clinical interviews, and then applies DAPO to optimize a composite reward capturing diagnostic accuracy, tool call quality, and exam cost including financial cost and patient discomfort. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate that MedExAgent achieves diagnostic performance comparable to larger models while maintaining cost-efficient examination strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_07058
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MedExAgent: Training LLM Agents to Ask, Examine, and Diagnose in Noisy Clinical Environments
Gao, Yicheng
Zhou, Xiaolin
Li, Yahan
Zhao, Yue
Liu, Ruishan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Real-world clinical diagnosis is a complex process in which the doctor is required to obtain information from both interaction with the patient and conducting medical exams. Additionally, the doctor needs to adapt to different patient personas, as well as noisy and incomplete information that can happen at any time during the process. However, existing benchmarks for medical LLMs and methods for automatic diagnosis largely simplify this process by reducing it to single-turn question answering, noise-free conversations, or sequential exam making, etc., ignoring the interactive and uncertain nature of clinical diagnosis. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by formalizing clinical diagnosis as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) with three action types: questioning the patient, ordering medical exams as tool calls, and issuing a diagnosis. We also introduce a systematic noise model comprising seven patient noise types and three exam noise types. Using our proposed environment, we train an effective diagnosis agent, \textbf{MedExAgent}, through a two-stage pipeline that first performs supervised finetuning on synthetic conversations structured after the Calgary-Cambridge model for clinical interviews, and then applies DAPO to optimize a composite reward capturing diagnostic accuracy, tool call quality, and exam cost including financial cost and patient discomfort. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate that MedExAgent achieves diagnostic performance comparable to larger models while maintaining cost-efficient examination strategies.
title MedExAgent: Training LLM Agents to Ask, Examine, and Diagnose in Noisy Clinical Environments
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07058