# QM-ToT: A Medical Tree of Thoughts Reasoning Framework for Quantized Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12334 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12334/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 32 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Clinical and biomedical applications](https://mlsanity.com/lr/clinical-and-biomedical-applications/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08073/) (2022)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10341/) (2022)
- [From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16594/) (2024)
- [Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09617/) (2023)
- [Alphazero-like Tree-Search can Guide Large Language Model Decoding and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17179/) (2023)
- [Capabilities of Gemini Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18416/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models in Medicine: Progress, Application, and Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05112/) (2023)
- [Evolutionary Computation in the Era of Large Language Model: Survey and Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10034/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Quantized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18158/) (2024)
- [Unlocking the Capabilities of Thought: A Reasoning Boundary Framework to Quantify and Optimize Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05695/) (2024)
- [SALMON: Self-Alignment with Instructable Reward Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05910/) (2023)
- [DALK: Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG to answer Alzheimer's Disease Questions with Scientific Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04819/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Medical Large Language Models: Technology, Application, Trustworthiness, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03712/) (2024)
- [A Preliminary Study of o1 in Medicine: Are We Closer to an AI Doctor?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15277/) (2024)
- [TC-RAG:Turing-Complete RAG's Case study on Medical LLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09199/) (2024)
- [Exploring the True Potential: Evaluating the Black-box Optimization Capability of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06290/) (2024)
- [Design Principle Transfer in Neural Architecture Search via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11330/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model-Aided Evolutionary Search for Constrained Multiobjective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05767/) (2024)

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

- [MedSynapse-V: Bridging Visual Perception and Clinical Intuition via Latent Memory Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26283/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in specialized biomedical tasks due to the inherent complexity of medical reasoning and the sensitive nature of clinical data. Existing LLMs often struggle with intricate medical terminology and the need for accurate clinical insights, leading to performance reduction when quantized for resource-constrained deployment. To address these issues, we propose Quantized Medical Tree of Thought (QM-ToT), a path-based reasoning framework. QM-ToT leverages a Tree of Thought (ToT) reasoning approach to decompose complex medical problems into manageable subtasks, coupled with evaluator assessment layers. This framework facilitates substantial performance improvements in INT4-quantized models on the challenging MedQAUSMLE dataset. Specifically, we demonstrate a remarkable accuracy increase from 34% to 50% for the LLaMA2-70b model and from 58.77% to 69.49% for LLaMA-3.1-8b. Besides, we also proposed an effect data distillation method based on ToT. Compared to the traditional distillation method, we achieved an improvement of 86. 27% while using only 3.9% of the data.This work, for the first time, showcases the potential of ToT to significantly enhance performance on complex biomedical tasks, establishing a crucial foundation for future advances in deploying high-performing quantized LLM in resource-limited medical settings.