# Human-AI collectives produce the most accurate differential diagnoses

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14981/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [LLM-Blender: Ensembling Large Language Models with Pairwise Ranking and Generative Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02561/) (2023)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16452/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Hallucination Mitigation Techniques in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01313/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Guided Tree-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08291/) (2023)
- [Med-HALT: Medical Domain Hallucination Test for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15343/) (2023)
- [In-Context Impersonation Reveals Large Language Models' Strengths and Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14930/) (2023)
- [Power to the People? Opportunities and Challenges for Participatory AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07572/) (2022)
- [The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00907/) (2023)
- [Easy Problems That LLMs Get Wrong](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19616/) (2024)
- [Getting from Generative AI to Trustworthy AI: What LLMs might learn from Cyc](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04445/) (2023)
- [Combining Insights From Multiple Large Language Models Improves Diagnostic Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08806/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [CLR-voyance: Reinforcing Open-Ended Reasoning for Inpatient Clinical Decision Support with Outcome-Aware Rubrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09584/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), are increasingly being employed in high-stakes decisions that impact both individuals and society at large, often without adequate safeguards to ensure safety, quality, and equity. Yet LLMs hallucinate, lack common sense, and are biased - shortcomings that may reflect LLMs' inherent limitations and thus may not be remedied by more sophisticated architectures, more data, or more human feedback. Relying solely on LLMs for complex, high-stakes decisions is therefore problematic. Here we present a hybrid collective intelligence system that mitigates these risks by leveraging the complementary strengths of human experience and the vast information processed by LLMs. We apply our method to open-ended medical diagnostics, combining 40,762 differential diagnoses made by physicians with the diagnoses of five state-of-the art LLMs across 2,133 medical cases. We show that hybrid collectives of physicians and LLMs outperform both single physicians and physician collectives, as well as single LLMs and LLM ensembles. This result holds across a range of medical specialties and professional experience, and can be attributed to humans' and LLMs' complementary contributions that lead to different kinds of errors. Our approach highlights the potential for collective human and machine intelligence to improve accuracy in complex, open-ended domains like medical diagnostics.