mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents

arXiv 2405.02957 ↗First posted 5 May 2024cs.AIcited by 218

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Medical and scientific domain agents

Abstract (arXiv)

The recent rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a new wave of technological revolution in medical artificial intelligence (AI). While LLMs are designed to understand and generate text like a human, autonomous agents that utilize LLMs as their "brain" have exhibited capabilities beyond text processing such as planning, reflection, and using tools by enabling their "bodies" to interact with the environment. We introduce a simulacrum of hospital called Agent Hospital that simulates the entire process of treating illness, in which all patients, nurses, and doctors are LLM-powered autonomous agents. Within the simulacrum, doctor agents are able to evolve by treating a large number of patient agents without the need to label training data manually. After treating tens of thousands of patient agents in the simulacrum (human doctors may take several years in the real world), the evolved doctor agents outperform state-of-the-art medical agent methods on the MedQA benchmark comprising US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) test questions. Our methods of simulacrum construction and agent evolution have the potential in benefiting a broad range of applications beyond medical AI.

Key facts. Cited by 218 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical and scientific domain agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 19 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 May 2024.

Builds on

19 of 34 references.

References · 19

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  4. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,276
  5. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,568
  6. 2020What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Examscited by 1,356
  7. 2023Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversationscited by 839
  8. 2023Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicinecited by 329
  9. 2023Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervisioncited by 318
  10. 2023MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoningcited by 316
  11. 2023Exploring Large Language Models for Communication Games: An Empirical Study on Werewolfcited by 241
  12. 2023S3: Social-network Simulation System with Large Language Model-Empowered Agentscited by 233
7 more
  1. 2022Can large language models reason about medical questions?cited by 194
  2. 2023EconAgent: Large Language Model-Empowered Agents for Simulating Macroeconomic Activitiescited by 154
  3. 2023War and Peace (WarAgent): Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Simulation of World Warscited by 145
  4. 2023AgentCF: Collaborative Learning with Autonomous Language Agents for Recommender Systemscited by 116
  5. 2023MetaAgents: Large Language Model Based Agents for Decision-Making on Teamingcited by 85
  6. 2024In-Context Principle Learning from Mistakescited by 44
  7. 2024Self-seeding and Multi-intent Self-instructing LLMs for Generating Intent-aware Information-Seeking dialogscited by 18

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 48; 2025: 98; 2026: 72.

218 papers.

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  1. 2024HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMscited by 265
  2. 2024Scaling Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Collaborationcited by 241
  3. 2024AgentClinic: a multimodal agent benchmark to evaluate AI in simulated clinical environmentscited by 231
  4. 2025Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoningcited by 230
  5. 2025Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challengescited by 205
  6. 2025A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligencecited by 170
  7. 2024AgentSquare: Automatic LLM Agent Search in Modular Design Spacecited by 155
  8. 2025From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 149
  9. 2024Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agentscited by 127
  10. 2025Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systemscited by 126
  11. 2025Adaptive Attacks Break Defenses Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM Agentscited by 125
  12. 2024GuardAgent: Safeguard LLM Agents by a Guard Agent via Knowledge-Enabled Reasoningcited by 124
38 more
  1. 2024FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Makingcited by 113
  2. 2024MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agentcited by 109
  3. 2025Multi-Agent Collaboration via Evolving Orchestrationcited by 108
  4. 2024On the Resilience of LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration with Faulty Agentscited by 99
  5. 2025AGrail: A Lifelong Agent Guardrail with Effective and Adaptive Safety Detectioncited by 89
  6. 2025A Survey of LLM-based Agents in Medicine: How far are we from Baymax?cited by 85
  7. 2024From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agentscited by 82
  8. 2025From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discoverycited by 77
  9. 2024Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Collaboration Networks for Software Developmentcited by 74
  10. 2025AgentRxiv: Towards Collaborative Autonomous Researchcited by 72
  11. 2024Preble: Efficient Distributed Prompt Scheduling for LLM Servingcited by 70
  12. 2024Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Beyond: A Comprehensive Survey on How to Make your LLMs use External Data More Wiselycited by 66
  13. 2024Ask-before-Plan: Proactive Language Agents for Real-World Planningcited by 60
  14. 2025Baichuan-M2: Scaling Medical Capability with Large Verifier Systemcited by 59
  15. 2024A Survey on LLM-based Multi-Agent System: Recent Advances and New Frontiers in Applicationcited by 55
  16. 2025Do as We Do, Not as You Think: the Conformity of Large Language Modelscited by 53
  17. 2025SeRL: Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models with Limited Datacited by 51
  18. 2024GenSim: A General Social Simulation Platform with Large Language Model based Agentscited by 50
  19. 2024VILA-M3: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Medical Expert Knowledgecited by 50
  20. 2025LLM Agents Making Agent Toolscited by 48
  21. 2025AppAgentX: Evolving GUI Agents as Proficient Smartphone Userscited by 46
  22. 2025A Survey on the Optimization of Large Language Model-based Agentscited by 46
  23. 2024Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactionscited by 43
  24. 2025Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Simulations for Realistic Clinical Interactionscited by 40
  25. 2025MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoningcited by 40
  26. 2025PathFinder: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent System for Medical Diagnostic Decision-Making Applied to Histopathologycited by 39
  27. 2024AgentCourt: Simulating Court with Adversarial Evolvable Lawyer Agentscited by 37
  28. 2024Benchmarking Agentic Workflow Generationcited by 37
  29. 2024MEDCO: Medical Education Copilots Based on A Multi-Agent Frameworkcited by 33
  30. 2025PatientSim: A Persona-Driven Simulator for Realistic Doctor-Patient Interactionscited by 32
  31. 2024Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestrationcited by 30
  32. 2024LAMBDA: A Large Model Based Data Agentcited by 30
  33. 2025LLM-based Human Simulations Have Not Yet Been Reliablecited by 30
  34. 2025CPathAgent: An Agent-based Foundation Model for Interpretable High-Resolution Pathology Image Analysis Mimicking Pathologists' Diagnostic Logiccited by 29
  35. 2024ClinicalLab: Aligning Agents for Multi-Departmental Clinical Diagnostics in the Real Worldcited by 28
  36. 2024DelTA: An Online Document-Level Translation Agent Based on Multi-Level Memorycited by 27
  37. 2025Real-World Doctor Agent with Proactive Consultation through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 27
  38. 2024Social Science Meets LLMs: How Reliable Are Large Language Models in Social Simulations?cited by 26

50 most cited of 218 All 218 (JSON)

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  1. 2024AI Hospital: Benchmarking Large Language Models in a Multi-agent Medical Interaction Simulator
  2. 2024Simulated patient systems powered by large language model-based AI agents offer potential for transforming medical education
  3. 2023Large Language Models Illuminate a Progressive Pathway to Artificial Healthcare Assistant: A Review
  4. 2025AI Agents for Conversational Patient Triage: Preliminary Simulation-Based Evaluation with Real-World EHR Data
  5. 2024Adaptive Reasoning and Acting in Medical Language Agents
  6. 2024Towards Next-Generation Medical Agent: How o1 is Reshaping Decision-Making in Medical Scenarios
  7. 2023Large Language Models as Agents in the Clinic
  8. 2025CP-Env: Evaluating Large Language Models on Clinical Pathways in a Controllable Hospital Environment