# AR-Med: Automated Relevance Enhancement in Medical Search via LLM-Driven Information Augmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03737 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03737/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

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- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [CodeGen: An Open Large Language Model for Code with Multi-Turn Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13474/) (2022)
- [Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13375/) (2023)
- [Don't Make Your LLM an Evaluation Benchmark Cheater](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01964/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Model Empowered Agents for Recommendation and Search: Towards Next-Generation Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05659/) (2025)
- [R2MED: A Benchmark for Reasoning-Driven Medical Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14558/) (2025)
- [AutoMIR: Effective Zero-Shot Medical Information Retrieval without Relevance Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20050/) (2024)
- [RecKG: Knowledge Graph for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03598/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate and reliable search on online healthcare platforms is critical for user safety and service efficacy. Traditional methods, however, often fail to comprehend complex and nuanced user queries, limiting their effectiveness. Large language models (LLMs) present a promising solution, offering powerful semantic understanding to bridge this gap. Despite their potential, deploying LLMs in this high-stakes domain is fraught with challenges, including factual hallucinations, specialized knowledge gaps, and high operational costs. To overcome these barriers, we introduce AR-Med, a novel framework for Automated Relevance assessment for Medical search that has been successfully deployed at scale on the Online Medical Delivery Platforms. AR-Med grounds LLM reasoning in verified medical knowledge through a retrieval-augmented approach, ensuring high accuracy and reliability. To enable efficient online service, we design a practical knowledge distillation scheme that compresses large teacher models into compact yet powerful student models. We also introduce LocalQSMed, a multi-expert annotated benchmark developed to guide model iteration and ensure strong alignment between offline and online performance. Extensive experiments show AR-Med achieves an offline accuracy of over 93%, a 24% absolute improvement over the original online system, and delivers significant gains in online relevance and user satisfaction. Our work presents a practical and scalable blueprint for developing trustworthy, LLM-powered systems in real-world healthcare applications.