mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

MDAgents: An Adaptive Collaboration of LLMs for Medical Decision-Making

arXiv 2404.15155 ↗First posted 22 Apr 2024cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 162

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Cited by 77 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models are becoming valuable tools in medicine. Yet despite their promise, the best way to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex medical tasks remains an open question. We introduce a novel multi-agent framework, named Medical Decision-making Agents (MDAgents) that helps address this gap by automatically assigning a collaboration structure to a team of LLMs. The assigned solo or group collaboration structure is tailored to the medical task at hand, emulating real-world medical decision-making processes adapted to tasks of varying complexities. We evaluate our framework and baseline methods using state-of-the-art LLMs across a suite of real-world medical knowledge and medical diagnosis benchmarks, including a comparison of LLMs' medical complexity classification against human physicians. MDAgents achieved the best performance in seven out of ten benchmarks on tasks requiring an understanding of medical knowledge and multi-modal reasoning, showing a significant improvement of up to 4.2% (p < 0.05) compared to previous methods' best performances. Ablation studies reveal that MDAgents effectively determines medical complexity to optimize for efficiency and accuracy across diverse medical tasks. Notably, the combination of moderator review and external medical knowledge in group collaboration resulted in an average accuracy improvement of 11.8%. Our code can be found at https://github.com/mitmedialab/MDAgents.

Key facts. Cited by 162 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 33 of its 82 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2024.

Builds on

33 of 82 references.

References · 33

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  2. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  3. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
  4. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
  5. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
  6. 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,323
  7. 2022Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledgecited by 1,807
  8. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
  9. 2020What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Examscited by 1,324
  10. 2019PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answeringcited by 1,271
  11. 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,143
  12. 2020Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processingcited by 996
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  1. 2023Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debatecited by 995
  2. 2023Large Language Modelscited by 774
  3. 2023Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causalitycited by 348
  4. 2024Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Medicinecited by 326
  5. 2023Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicinecited by 319
  6. 2023ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMscited by 297
  7. 2023A Dynamic LLM-Powered Agent Network for Task-Oriented Agent Collaborationcited by 281
  8. 2023Adapted Large Language Models Can Outperform Medical Experts in Clinical Text Summarizationcited by 244
  9. 2022Large Language Models are Few-Shot Clinical Information Extractorscited by 206
  10. 2023Improving Language Model Negotiation with Self-Play and In-Context Learning from AI Feedbackcited by 202
  11. 2023GeneGPT: Augmenting Large Language Models with Domain Tools for Improved Access to Biomedical Informationcited by 115
  12. 2023Towards Accurate Differential Diagnosis with Large Language Modelscited by 115
  13. 2024Meta-Prompting: Enhancing Language Models with Task-Agnostic Scaffoldingcited by 115
  14. 2024Benchmarking Large Language Models on Answering and Explaining Challenging Medical Questionscited by 106
  15. 2024EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Recordscited by 75
  16. 2023Large Language Models for Supply Chain Optimizationcited by 61
  17. 2023EHRXQA: A Multi-Modal Question Answering Dataset for Electronic Health Records with Chest X-ray Imagescited by 53
  18. 2024Uncertainty of Thoughts: Uncertainty-Aware Planning Enhances Information Seeking in Large Language Modelscited by 37
  19. 2024AgentMD: Empowering Language Agents for Risk Prediction with Large-Scale Clinical Tool Learningcited by 33
  20. 2024Do LLM Agents Have Regret? A Case Study in Online Learning and Gamescited by 33
  21. 2023The Capability of Large Language Models to Measure Psychiatric Functioningcited by 25

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 5; 2025: 75; 2026: 82.

162 papers.

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  2. 2025From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 146
  3. 2025Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systemscited by 125
  4. 2025Agentic AI for Scientific Discovery: A Survey of Progress, Challenges, and Future Directionscited by 74
  5. 2025MedAgent-Pro: Towards Evidence-based Multi-modal Medical Diagnosis via Reasoning Agentic Workflowcited by 71
  6. 2025MedRAX: Medical Reasoning Agent for Chest X-raycited by 68
  7. 2025MDocAgent: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understandingcited by 66
  8. 2025An Agentic System for Rare Disease Diagnosis with Traceable Reasoningcited by 50
  9. 2025A Survey on the Optimization of Large Language Model-based Agentscited by 45
  10. 2025MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworkscited by 38
  11. 2025MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoningcited by 37
  12. 2025BlindGuard: Safeguarding LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems under Unknown Attackscited by 37
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  2. 2025Medical World Model: Generative Simulation of Tumor Evolution for Treatment Planningcited by 31
  3. 2025PatientSim: A Persona-Driven Simulator for Realistic Doctor-Patient Interactionscited by 30
  4. 2024ClinicalLab: Aligning Agents for Multi-Departmental Clinical Diagnostics in the Real Worldcited by 28
  5. 2025Where Did It All Go Wrong? A Hierarchical Look into Multi-Agent Error Attributioncited by 25
  6. 2025LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industrycited by 22
  7. 2025MedAgentGym: A Scalable Agentic Training Environment for Code-Centric Reasoning in Biomedical Data Sciencecited by 22
  8. 2024MedAide: Information Fusion and Anatomy of Medical Intents via LLM-based Agent Collaborationcited by 16
  9. 2025Cancer-Myth: Evaluating Large Language Models on Patient Questions with False Presuppositionscited by 15
  10. 2025Cascaded Language Models for Cost-effective Human-AI Decision-Makingcited by 11
  11. 2025PixelCraft: A Multi-Agent System for High-Fidelity Visual Reasoning on Structured Imagescited by 11
  12. 2025A Survey of Scaling in Large Language Model Reasoningcited by 10
  13. 2025Enhancing Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs via Persona Promptscited by 10
  14. 2025HealthFlow: A Self-Evolving AI Agent with Meta Planning for Autonomous Healthcare Researchcited by 10
  15. 2026Evolving Medical Imaging Agents via Experience-driven Self-skill Discoverycited by 10
  16. 2025TAMA: A Human-AI Collaborative Thematic Analysis Framework Using Multi-Agent LLMs for Clinical Interviewscited by 9
  17. 2025MedOrch: Medical Diagnosis with Tool-Augmented Reasoning Agents for Flexible Extensibilitycited by 9
  18. 2025MedLA: A Logic-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Complex Medical Reasoning with Large Language Modelscited by 9
  19. 2025Beyond Reactivity: Measuring Proactive Problem Solving in LLM Agentscited by 9
  20. 2024Automating Traffic Model Enhancement with AI Research Agentcited by 8
  21. 2024A Perspective for Adapting Generalist AI to Specialized Medical AI Applications and Their Challengescited by 8
  22. 2025MedSentry: Understanding and Mitigating Safety Risks in Medical LLM Multi-Agent Systemscited by 8
  23. 2025MedMMV: A Controllable Multimodal Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable and Verifiable Clinical Reasoningcited by 8
  24. 2026SkillGraph: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Collaboration with Multimodal Graph Topologycited by 8
  25. 2025Towards Robust Evaluation of STEM Education: Leveraging MLLMs in Project-Based Learningcited by 7
  26. 2025Tiered Agentic Oversight: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent System for Healthcare Safetycited by 7
  27. 2025SynapseRoute: An Auto-Route Switching Framework on Dual-State Large Language Modelcited by 7
  28. 2025WSI-Agents: A Collaborative Multi-Agent System for Multi-Modal Whole Slide Image Analysiscited by 7
  29. 2025TRIDENT: Benchmarking LLM Safety in Finance, Medicine, and Lawcited by 7
  30. 2025CXRAgent: Director-Orchestrated Multi-Stage Reasoning for Chest X-Ray Interpretationcited by 7
  31. 2025Evolving Interactive Diagnostic Agents in a Virtual Clinical Environmentcited by 7
  32. 2025PDE-Agent: A toolchain-augmented multi-agent framework for PDE solvingcited by 7
  33. 2026Thinking with Deltas: Incentivizing Reinforcement Learning via Differential Visual Reasoning Policycited by 6
  34. 2026Evo-MedAgent: Beyond One-Shot Diagnosis with Agents That Remember, Reflect, and Improvecited by 6
  35. 2024A Demonstration of Adaptive Collaboration of Large Language Models for Medical Decision-Makingcited by 5
  36. 2025Med-R2: Crafting Trustworthy LLM Physicians via Retrieval and Reasoning of Evidence-Based Medicinecited by 5
  37. 2025MRGAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Improved Medical Report Generation with Med-LVLMscited by 5
  38. 2025FinTeam: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Intelligence System for Comprehensive Financial Scenarioscited by 5

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