arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Assessing the Downstream Utility of Evidence-Aware Retrieval in RAG

The paper investigates whether incorporating an evidence-support signal into retrieval evaluation for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) improves downstream decision‑making. Across multiple benchmarks and a TREC RAG 2025 setting, the evidence signal alters retriever rankings but its benefits vary: it does not consistently enhance retriever training, its usefulness for system selection depends on generator instructions, and it does not reliably predict answer quality on unseen topics. Human filtering of evidence‑rich passages preserves useful content, yet evaluators disagree on whether this improves final answers, indicating that evidence‑aware evaluation alone does not guarantee better downstream outcomes.

By Utshab Kumar Ghosh, Debayan Mukhopadhyay, Shubham Chatterjee
arXiv AI
Jul 9

Healthier LLMs: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Public Health Question Answering

arXiv:2607. 06641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve promising results on medical question answering benchmarks, yet their use in public health is constrained by hallucinations and the rapid evolution of official guidance.

By Felix Feldman, Joshua Harris, Timothy Laurence, Leo Loman, Ollie Higgins, Fan Grayson, Poonam Soma, Bethany Pace-Bonello, Michael Borowitz, Toby Nonnenmacher
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

UIC-AIHealth4All at ArchEHR-QA 2026: Answer-First Evidence Grounding for Clinical Question Answering

The UIC-AIHealth4All system was presented for the ArchEHR-QA 2026 shared task on grounded question answering from electronic health records. It participated in evidence identification, answer generation, and answer‑evidence alignment, using an answer‑first pipeline that generates candidate answers with cited note sentences before classifying the full evidence set. The system ranked third in evidence identification, ninth in answer generation, and fifth in answer‑evidence alignment, and a linguistic analysis showed its outputs were harder to read than clinician‑authored references, highlighting the need for readability optimization in clinical NLP.

By Mohammad Arvan, Hossein Haeri, Natalie Parde, Rebecca T. Feinstein
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

CXR-Retrieve: Compositional Text-to-Image Retrieval in Chest Radiography

Large chest radiography archives are difficult to search because most studies are paired only with free-text reports rather than structured clinical annotations. Vision-language models offer a natural interface for text-to-image retrieval, but current biomedical models are primarily optimized for report-to-image matching rather than for satisfying short clinical search queries.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

LLM-Specific Utility for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."

By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv AI
Jun 16

EHRNote-ChatQA: A Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Multi-Turn Clinical Question Answering over Longitudinal Discharge Summaries

arXiv:2606. 15735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discharge summaries are crucial clinical documents containing the context of a patient's overall hospital stay, and are routinely reviewed by medical experts for patient readmission, ongoing care, and diagnostic decision-making.

By Jiyoun Kim, Muhan Yeo, Eunhye Jang, Jeewon Yang, Hangyul Yoon, Su Ji Lee, Hee Jo Han, Hee-Jae Jung, Doyun Kwon, Jun young Lee, Jaehun Lee, Jung-Oh Lee, Sunjun Kweon, Jong Hak Moon, Daseul Kim, Minjae Cho, Edward Choi