The study evaluates whether the chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales produced by medical language models truly influence their answers. Using a 30‑operator perturbation audit that modifies both the question and the CoT (e.g., severity reversal, negation flip, demographic swap, evidence ablation), the authors found that 72.9% of edits did not change the model’s answer—a high Chain‑Decoupling Rate (CDR). Across 14 large language models and four medical QA benchmarks, the CoT text had little impact on accuracy, and removing CoT prompting did not reduce performance.
"whyItMatters":"The findings suggest that current medical CoT outputs may be more documentation than genuine reasoning, highlighting the need for better faithfulness checks in clinical AI systems."
By Mengzhu Xu, Jifan Gao, Xia Jiang, Yaoxin Wu, Xi Long
arXiv:2607. 20827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents choose tools and arguments from context that mixes user requests, tool outputs, retrieved records, memory, and untrusted text.
By Junchi Liao
arXiv:2608. 05235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions.
By Zijie Zhuang, Changxin Lao, Pengbo Xu, Hanwen Xu, Ruochen Yang, Yingzhi He, Peng Zhang, Jiangxia Cao, Yusheng Huang, Guohong Mu, Jian Liang, Ruiming Tang, Shuang Yang, Zhaojie Liu, Wenwu Ou, Kun Gai
arXiv:2608.22062v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Longitudinal clinical event-relation verification determines whether a patient record supports a specified relation among two or more clinical events....
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arXiv:2608.23397v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Interactive clinical agents must gather decisive evidence and convert it into grounded actions under partial observability. A correct final diagnosis a...
By Ruoyu Wu, Shenfu Xie, Yinqian Sun, Haibo Tong, Feifei Zhao
arXiv:2607. 18999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn medical consultation agents must decide what to ask, adapt to patient responses, and determine when the collected evidence is sufficient.
By Guofeng Zhang, Yizeng Quan, Huaiyi Fang, Jianwei Lv, Jinyao Liu, Xunxu Duan, Lening An, Yu Ouyang, Junfeng Wang
arXiv:2607. 28788v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical diagnosis at hospital admission must be made rapidly from limited, incomplete evidence.
By Jiahui Li, Ruili Fang, Zishuai Liu, Yutong Guo, Nan Yang, Wenzhan Song, Jin Lu, Fei Dou
arXiv:2607. 08038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diagnostic error is a major threat to patient safety, yet current large language model (LLM) systems often treat diagnosis as a one-shot prediction task, lacking safeguards against missed high-risk alternatives or rigorous verification of their reasoning.
By Fan Ma, Mauro Giuffr\`e, Donald Wright, Kent McCann, Mark Iscoe, Lingfei Qian, Mingyang Jiang, Chi Wing Ng, Na Hong, Huan He, Cathy Shyr, Qingyu Chen, Lee Schwamm, Lucila Ohno-Machado, Hua Xu
arXiv:2606. 01120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In RAG-based fact-checking, LLMs are increasingly used as verifiers to check given claims against retrieved evidence.
By Yuxi Sun, Wenbo Shang, Wei Gao, Xin Huang, Jing Ma
arXiv:2607. 06802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open physiological corpora are heterogeneous: they use different sensors, labels, sampling rates, recording settings, and clinical endpoints.
By Dovy Paukstys
arXiv:2608. 07796v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models perform strongly on medical knowledge benchmarks, but reliable clinical deployment requires agents to conduct defensible investigations over heterogeneous, longitudinal records: determining what evidence is needed, retrieving and reconciling structured and free-text data, grounding conclusions in verifiable evidence, and deferring cases that cannot be resolved reliably.
By Veronica Chatrath, Bryan Zhu, George Pu, Jingxuan Fan, Apaar Shanker, Varun Ursekar, Anahita Sharma, Jason Qin, Keqi Han, Soham Dinesh Tiwari, Soham Dan, Vijay Kalmath, Yuan Li, Daniel Yue Zhang, Chenguang Wang, Zainab Doctor, Zhijun Yin, Nigam H. Shah, Yuan Xue
EviDx is a new framework for evidence-aware active diagnosis that pairs patient-specific diagnostic environments with a clinical scaffold and an observer-guided runtime harness. The framework constructs interactive environments from raw clinical cases, organizes role-specialized agents and evidence tools, and regulates diagnostic termination by tracking uncertainty and evidence coverage. Experiments demonstrate that EviDx improves diagnostic performance and process stability while revealing model-dependent capability boundaries.
By Lihang Zeng, Shaoting Zhang, Xiaofan Zhang