mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Large Language Models Perform Diagnostic Reasoning

arXiv 2307.08922 ↗First posted 18 Jul 2023cs.CLcited by 18

On the map: LLM reasoning → Clinical and biomedical applications

Abstract (arXiv)

We explore the extension of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to medical reasoning for the task of automatic diagnosis. Motivated by doctors' underlying reasoning process, we present Diagnostic-Reasoning CoT (DR-CoT). Empirical results demonstrate that by simply prompting large language models trained only on general text corpus with two DR-CoT exemplars, the diagnostic accuracy improves by 15% comparing to standard prompting. Moreover, the gap reaches a pronounced 18% in out-domain settings. Our findings suggest expert-knowledge reasoning in large language models can be elicited through proper promptings.

Key facts. Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 12 of its 18 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2023.

Builds on

12 of 18 references.

References · 12

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  2. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,459
  3. 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,374
  4. 2022Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Themcited by 1,807
  5. 2022Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Taskscited by 1,076
  6. 2022Language Models of Code are Few-Shot Commonsense Learnerscited by 160
  7. 2022DDXPlus: A New Dataset For Automatic Medical Diagnosiscited by 88
  8. 2019ACUTE-EVAL: Improved Dialogue Evaluation with Optimized Questions and Multi-turn Comparisonscited by 83
  9. 2019End-to-End Knowledge-Routed Relational Dialogue System for Automatic Diagnosiscited by 70
  10. 2021Few-Shot Bot: Prompt-Based Learning for Dialogue Systemscited by 64
  11. 2019Approximating Interactive Human Evaluation with Self-Play for Open-Domain Dialog Systemscited by 42
  12. 2022"My nose is running.""Are you also coughing?": Building A Medical Diagnosis Agent with Interpretable Inquiry Logicscited by 9

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 3; 2024: 3; 2025: 8; 2026: 4.

18 papers.

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  1. 2024Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalizationcited by 208
  2. 2024From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agentscited by 82
  3. 2023Unleashing the potential of prompt engineering for large language modelscited by 72
  4. 2025MEDDxAgent: A Unified Modular Agent Framework for Explainable Automatic Differential Diagnosiscited by 23
  5. 2025IMPersona: Evaluating Individual Level LM Impersonationcited by 11
  6. 2023Three Questions Concerning the Use of Large Language Models to Facilitate Mathematics Learningcited by 9
  7. 2025Integrating Chain-of-Thought and Retrieval Augmented Generation Enhances Rare Disease Diagnosis from Clinical Notescited by 7
  8. 2025Applications of Large Models in Medicinecited by 6
  9. 2026Medical Reasoning with Large Language Models: A Survey and MR-Benchcited by 4
  10. 2026InfoGatherer: Principled Information Seeking via Evidence Retrieval and Strategic Questioningcited by 3
  11. 2026ProEvent: An Event-centric Benchmark for Proactive Agentscited by 2
  12. 2025Beyond MedQA: Towards Real-world Clinical Decision Making in the Era of LLMscited by 1
6 more
  1. 2023EHR Interaction Between Patients and AI: NoteAid EHR Interactioncited by 0
  2. 2024SemioLLM: Evaluating Large Language Models for Diagnostic Reasoning from Unstructured Clinical Narratives in Epilepsycited by 0
  3. 2025SwasthLLM: a Unified Cross-Lingual, Multi-Task, and Meta-Learning Zero-Shot Framework for Medical Diagnosis Using Contrastive Representationscited by 0
  4. 2025From Simulation to Strategy: Automating Personalized Interaction Planning for Conversational Agentscited by 0
  5. 2025Leveraging Evidence-Guided LLMs to Enhance Trustworthy Depression Diagnosiscited by 0
  6. 2026MedUPS: Towards Diagnostic Assistance in Uncommon Medical Cases with Large Language Modelscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2023Large Language Models are Clinical Reasoners: Reasoning-Aware Diagnosis Framework with Prompt-Generated Rationales
  2. 2023Diagnostic Reasoning Prompts Reveal the Potential for Large Language Model Interpretability in Medicine
  3. 2025Brittleness and Promise: Knowledge Graph Based Reward Modeling for Diagnostic Reasoning
  4. 2025Why Chain of Thought Fails in Clinical Text Understanding
  5. 2026To Reason or Not to: Selective Chain-of-Thought in Medical Question Answering
  6. 2025Chiron-o1: Igniting Multimodal Large Language Models towards Generalizable Medical Reasoning via Mentor-Intern Collaborative Search
  7. 2026MedThink: Enhancing Diagnostic Accuracy in Small Models via Teacher-Guided Reasoning Correction
  8. 2025m1: Unleash the Potential of Test-Time Scaling for Medical Reasoning with Large Language Models