arXiv AI

Inhibitory Attention for Clinical Long-Context Reasoning: Characterizing and Mitigating Lost-in-the-Middle Effects in EHR Processing

The paper identifies a new problem in clinical natural language processing called the clinical lost‑in‑the‑middle (CLitM) effect, where large language models perform poorly on information located near the center of long electronic health record (EHR) documents. Using the MedAlign dataset, the authors quantify a 21.9‑percentage‑point accuracy gap across 2,196 instruction‑response pairs and six models, showing that most critical facts lie in the CLitM trough. They propose Query‑Conditioned Clinical Suppression (QCCS), a lightweight context‑selection gate that outperforms traditional retrieval methods (BM25, dense retrieval, cross‑encoder reranking) on a held‑out set of 83 instructions, achieving up to 25.3% accuracy for middle‑position queries. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that standard retrieval strategies fail to reliably surface central clinical information, and that a query‑aligned selection mechanism can substantially improve model performance on critical EHR data."

arXiv AI
Jul 13

Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation vs. Long-Context Input for Clinical Reasoning over EHRs

arXiv:2508. 14817v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Objective: To evaluate whether retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can serve as an efficient alternative to long-context prompting for clinical reasoning over electronic health records (EHRs).

By Skatje Myers, Dmitriy Dligach, Timothy A. Miller, Samantha Barr, James Landefeld, Yanjun Gao, Matthew Churpek, Anoop Mayampurath, Majid Afshar
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Compositional Reasoning Depth Predicts Clinical AI Failure: Empirical Evidence Consistent with Transformer Compositionality Limits in Electronic Health Record Question Answering

arXiv:2606. 16890v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aggregate accuracy benchmarks conceal a systematic structure in how large language models fail at electronic health record (EHR) question answering: questions requiring more inferential steps produce disproportionately more errors.

By Sanjay Basu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Retrieval-Augmented Agentic Rubric Generation for Reliable Medical Response Evaluation

The paper introduces a retrieval‑augmented multi‑agent framework that automatically generates instance‑specific evaluation rubrics for medical language models. By retrieving authoritative medical evidence, decomposing it into atomic facts, and combining these with user interaction constraints, the system produces fine‑grained criteria that outperform GPT‑4o on HealthBench and LLMEval‑Med. The generated rubrics also guide response refinement, improving medical LLM output quality by 9.2%.

By Yinzhu Chen, Abdine Maiga, Hossein A. Rahmani, Emine Yilmaz
arXiv AI
Jul 20

Ruling Out to Rule In: Contrastive Hypothesis Retrieval for Medical Question Answering

arXiv:2604. 04593v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external medical knowledge, yet standard retrievers frequently surface hard negatives that are semantically close to the query but describe clinically distinct conditions.

By Byeolhee Kim, Min-Kyung Kim, Young-Hak Kim, Tae-Joon Jeon
arXiv AI
Aug 13

A corpus-specific clinical RAG system matches or outperforms newer frontier LLMs on HealthBench

arXiv:2608. 12138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: General-purpose large language models (LLMs) have recently been reported to match or exceed specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks, but such comparisons draw on a narrow set of systems and on benchmarks developed largely in high-income settings.

By Praveen Reddy, Charuta Mandke, Suvrankar Datta, Sarah Khan, Siddharth Reddy Anthireddy, Shitij Arora, Vishal Singh
arXiv AI
3d ago

Option-Aware Retrieval and Task-Specific VLM Adaptation for Medical VQA

The paper presents a system for the MedReason 2026 challenge that tackles both multiple‑choice and open‑ended medical visual question answering using offline, containerized inference. Key findings include that comparing answer semantics rather than labels boosts retrieval‑only accuracy from 20.0 % to 57.5 % on a 200‑case holdout, and that varying the number of in‑prompt retrieved examples has minimal impact on final accuracy (93.5 %–94.0 %). The final system achieves 94.0 % MCQ accuracy on the development set and 93.20 % on the official pre‑evaluation, far surpassing the off‑the‑shelf baseline. "whyItMatters":"The results demonstrate that semantic‑aware retrieval and careful adapter tuning can dramatically improve medical VQA performance, offering a practical approach for high‑accuracy, offline inference in clinical settings."

By Tristan Kirscher (ICube, Institut Strauss), Niklas C. Koser (CAU), Soren Pirk (CAU)