# Natural Language-Assisted Multi-modal Medication Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07166 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07166/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [RETAIN: An Interpretable Predictive Model for Healthcare using Reverse Time Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05745/) (2016)
- [Transfer Learning in Biomedical Natural Language Processing: An Evaluation of BERT and ELMo on Ten Benchmarking Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05474/) (2019)
- [Supervised Reinforcement Learning with Recurrent Neural Network for Dynamic Treatment Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01473/) (2018)
- [N-Gram Graph: Simple Unsupervised Representation for Graphs, with Applications to Molecules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09206/) (2018)
- [GAMENet: Graph Augmented MEmory Networks for Recommending Medication Combination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01852/) (2018)
- [Equivariant Graph Mechanics Networks with Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06442/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Energy-Motivated Equivariant Pretraining for 3D Molecular Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08824/) (2022)
- [Conditional Generation Net for Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06588/) (2022)
- [Dual Memory Neural Computer for Asynchronous Two-view Sequential Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00662/) (2018)
- [CASTER: Predicting Drug Interactions with Chemical Substructure Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06446/) (2019)
- [Neural Atoms: Propagating Long-range Interaction in Molecular Graphs through Efficient Communication Channel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01276/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Trustworthy AI Psychotherapy: Multi-Agent LLM Workflow for Counseling and Explainable Mental Disorder Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11398/) (2025)
- [Fine-grained List-wise Alignment for Generative Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20218/) (2025)
- [Combating the Bucket Effect:Multi-Knowledge Alignment for Medication Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18096/) (2025)
- [Improving Rare Medication Recommendation with Counterfactual Data Augmentation and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24829/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Combinatorial medication recommendation(CMR) is a fundamental task of healthcare, which offers opportunities for clinical physicians to provide more precise prescriptions for patients with intricate health conditions, particularly in the scenarios of long-term medical care. Previous research efforts have sought to extract meaningful information from electronic health records (EHRs) to facilitate combinatorial medication recommendations. Existing learning-based approaches further consider the chemical structures of medications, but ignore the textual medication descriptions in which the functionalities are clearly described. Furthermore, the textual knowledge derived from the EHRs of patients remains largely underutilized. To address these issues, we introduce the Natural Language-Assisted Multi-modal Medication Recommendation(NLA-MMR), a multi-modal alignment framework designed to learn knowledge from the patient view and medication view jointly. Specifically, NLA-MMR formulates CMR as an alignment problem from patient and medication modalities. In this vein, we employ pretrained language models(PLMs) to extract in-domain knowledge regarding patients and medications, serving as the foundational representation for both modalities. In the medication modality, we exploit both chemical structures and textual descriptions to create medication representations. In the patient modality, we generate the patient representations based on textual descriptions of diagnosis, procedure, and symptom. Extensive experiments conducted on three publicly accessible datasets demonstrate that NLA-MMR achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with a notable average improvement of 4.72% in Jaccard score. Our source code is publicly available on https://github.com/jtan1102/NLA-MMR_CIKM_2024.