# VITA: 'Carefully Chosen and Weighted Less' Is Better in Medication Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12100 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12100/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Pre-training of Graph Augmented Transformers for Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00346/) (2019)
- [GAMENet: Graph Augmented MEmory Networks for Recommending Medication Combination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01852/) (2018)
- [SafeDrug: Dual Molecular Graph Encoders for Recommending Effective and Safe Drug Combinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02711/) (2021)
- [Change Matters: Medication Change Prediction with Recurrent Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01876/) (2021)
- [Conditional Generation Net for Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06588/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Disentangling, Amplifying, and Debiasing: Learning Disentangled Representations for Fair Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12875/) (2024)
- [Unveiling Discrete Clues: Superior Healthcare Predictions for Rare Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16373/) (2025)
- [HypeMed: Enhancing Medication Recommendations with Hypergraph-Based Patient Relationships](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18459/) (2026)
- [Traceable Drug Recommendation over Medical Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27274/) (2025)
- [User-Adaptive Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Medication Recommendation with Uncertainty Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22820/) (2026)
- [RES-MR: Risk-Aware Reasoning for Explainable and Safe Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14474/) (2026)
- [ViSTA: A Simple Bridge Extends Visual Alignment to Clinical Time-Series Understanding in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31448/) (2026)
- [HEM-Med: A Hierarchical Agentic Memory Framework for Safe Multi-Center Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20191/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the medication recommendation problem, which aims to recommend effective medications for a patient's current visit by utilizing information (e.g., diagnoses and procedures) given at the patient's current and past visits. While there exist a number of recommender systems designed for this problem, we point out that they are challenged in accurately capturing the relation (spec., the degree of relevance) between the current and each of the past visits for the patient when obtaining her current health status, which is the basis for recommending medications. To address this limitation, we propose a novel medication recommendation framework, named VITA, based on the following two novel ideas: (1) relevant-Visit selectIon; (2) Target-aware Attention. Through extensive experiments using real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of VITA (spec., up to 5.56% higher accuracy, in terms of Jaccard, than the best competitor) and the effectiveness of its two core ideas. The code is available at https://github.com/jhheo0123/VITA.