# Inquire, Interact, and Integrate: A Proactive Agent Collaborative Framework for Zero-Shot Multimodal Medical Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11640 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11640/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 9 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Clinical and biomedical applications](https://mlsanity.com/lr/clinical-and-biomedical-applications/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Medical and scientific domain agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/medical-and-scientific-domain-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [Unified-IO: A Unified Model for Vision, Language, and Multi-Modal Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08916/) (2022)
- [PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10415/) (2023)
- [A Vision-Language Foundation Model to Enhance Efficiency of Chest X-ray Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12208/) (2024)
- [XrayGPT: Chest Radiographs Summarization using Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07971/) (2023)
- [LLM-CXR: Instruction-Finetuned LLM for CXR Image Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11490/) (2023)
- [ELIXR: Towards a general purpose X-ray artificial intelligence system through alignment of large language models and radiology vision encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01317/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Medical Reasoning in the Era of LLMs: A Systematic Review of Enhancement Techniques and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00669/) (2025)
- [From Perception to Reasoning: Deep Thinking Empowers Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12861/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) in healthcare has attracted significant research interest. However, their performance in healthcare remains under-investigated and potentially limited, due to i) they lack rich domain-specific knowledge and medical reasoning skills; and ii) most state-of-the-art LLMs are unimodal, text-only models that cannot directly process multimodal inputs. To this end, we propose a multimodal medical collaborative reasoning framework MultiMedRes, which incorporates a learner agent to proactively gain essential information from domain-specific expert models, to solve medical multimodal reasoning problems. Our method includes three steps: i) Inquire: The learner agent first decomposes given complex medical reasoning problems into multiple domain-specific sub-problems; ii) Interact: The agent then interacts with domain-specific expert models by repeating the ``ask-answer'' process to progressively obtain different domain-specific knowledge; iii) Integrate: The agent finally integrates all the acquired domain-specific knowledge to accurately address the medical reasoning problem. We validate the effectiveness of our method on the task of difference visual question answering for X-ray images. The experiments demonstrate that our zero-shot prediction achieves state-of-the-art performance, and even outperforms the fully supervised methods. Besides, our approach can be incorporated into various LLMs and multimodal LLMs to significantly boost their performance.