mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MKRAG: Medical Knowledge Retrieval Augmented Generation for Medical Question Answering

arXiv 2309.16035 ↗First posted 27 Sep 2023cs.CL cs.AIcited by 23

On the map: Retrieval-augmented generation → Medical and biomedical RAG

Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs), although powerful in general domains, often perform poorly on domain-specific tasks such as medical question answering (QA). In addition, LLMs tend to function as "black-boxes", making it challenging to modify their behavior. To address the problem, our work employs a transparent process of retrieval augmented generation (RAG), aiming to improve LLM responses without the need for fine-tuning or retraining. Specifically, we propose a comprehensive retrieval strategy to extract medical facts from an external knowledge base, and then inject them into the LLM's query prompt. Focusing on medical QA, we evaluate the impact of different retrieval models and the number of facts on LLM performance using the MedQA-SMILE dataset. Notably, our retrieval-augmented Vicuna-7B model exhibited an accuracy improvement from 44.46% to 48.54%. This work underscores the potential of RAG to enhance LLM performance, offering a practical approach to mitigate the challenges posed by black-box LLMs.

Key facts. Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical and biomedical RAG, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation. Builds on 14 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2023.

Builds on

14 of 23 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023Almanac: Retrieval-Augmented Language Models for Clinical Medicine1 Mar

Other references · 13

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  3. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
  4. 2022Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPTcited by 2,609
  5. 2019BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text miningcited by 1,935
  6. 2020What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Examscited by 1,324
  7. 2023A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Modelscited by 1,227
  8. 2021Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learningcited by 1,203
  9. 2023Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Contextcited by 820
  10. 2021QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answeringcited by 386
  11. 2020Self-Alignment Pretraining for Biomedical Entity Representationscited by 233
  12. 2022Improving the Domain Adaptation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) Models for Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 126
1 more
  1. 2023Evaluating Large Language Models on a Highly-specialized Topic, Radiation Oncology Physicscited by 49

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 3; 2024: 7; 2025: 6; 2026: 7.

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  1. 2024A Comprehensive Study of Knowledge Editing for Large Language Modelscited by 157
  2. 2024Large Language Models for Robotics: Opportunities, Challenges, and Perspectivescited by 88
  3. 2024Revolutionizing Finance with LLMs: An Overview of Applications and Insightscited by 88
  4. 2024Few shot chain-of-thought driven reasoning to prompt LLMs for open ended medical question answeringcited by 31
  5. 2024Reasoning before Comparison: LLM-Enhanced Semantic Similarity Metrics for Domain Specialized Text Analysiscited by 21
  6. 2023Holistic Evaluation of GPT-4V for Biomedical Imagingcited by 19
  7. 2023Ophtha-LLaMA2: A Large Language Model for Ophthalmologycited by 9
  8. 2025CrashSage: A Large Language Model-Centered Framework for Contextual and Interpretable Traffic Crash Analysiscited by 6
  9. 2023Evaluating multiple large language models in pediatric ophthalmologycited by 4
  10. 2025KAG-Thinker: Interactive Thinking and Deep Reasoning in LLMs via Knowledge-Augmented Generationcited by 2
  11. 2025Contradictions in Context: Challenges for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Healthcarecited by 1
  12. 2025Build AI Assistants using Large Language Models and Agents to Enhance the Engineering Education of Biomechanicscited by 1
11 more
  1. 2024PACE: A Pragmatic Agent for Enhancing Communication Efficiency Using Large Language Modelscited by 0
  2. 2024A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Academic Literature Navigation in Data Sciencecited by 0
  3. 2025Exploring the Role of Knowledge Graph-Based RAG in Japanese Medical Question Answering with Small-Scale LLMscited by 0
  4. 2025CRAB: A Benchmark for Evaluating Curation of Retrieval-Augmented LLMs in Biomedicinecited by 0
  5. 2026From Evidence-Based Medicine to Knowledge Graph: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Sports Rehabilitation and a Domain Benchmarkcited by 0
  6. 2026UETQuintet at BioCreative IX -- MedHopQA: Enhancing Biomedical QA with Selective Multi-hop Reasoning and Contextual Retrievalcited by 0
  7. 2026Condition-Gated Reasoning for Context-Dependent Biomedical Question Answeringcited by 0
  8. 2026Dialogue to Question Generation for Evidence-based Medical Guideline Agent Developmentcited by 0
  9. 2026Effects of Cross-lingual Evidence in Multilingual Medical Question Answeringcited by 0
  10. 2026Healthier LLMs: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Public Health Question Answeringcited by 0
  11. 2026HypoKG: Evidence-Disciplined Biomedical Hypothesis Generation Beyond Endpoint Knowledgecited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Comprehensive and Practical Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems for Medical Question Answering
  2. 2026A Systematic Study of Retrieval Pipeline Design for Retrieval-Augmented Medical Question Answering
  3. 2025Optimizing Medical Question-Answering Systems: A Comparative Study of Fine-Tuned and Zero-Shot Large Language Models with RAG Framework
  4. 2024Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Medicine with Iterative Follow-up Questions
  5. 2025From Retrieval to Generation: Unifying External and Parametric Knowledge for Medical Question Answering
  6. 2025RGAR: Recurrence Generation-augmented Retrieval for Factual-aware Medical Question Answering
  7. 2026When Retrieval Doesn't Help: A Large-Scale Study of Biomedical RAG
  8. 2024Development and Testing of Retrieval Augmented Generation in Large Language Models -- A Case Study Report