# Condition-Gated Reasoning for Context-Dependent Biomedical Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17911 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17911/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06146/) (2019)
- [Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16039/) (2023)
- [Constructing Datasets for Multi-hop Reading Comprehension Across Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06481/) (2017)
- [MedCPT: Contrastive Pre-trained Transformers with Large-scale PubMed Search Logs for Zero-shot Biomedical Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00589/) (2023)
- [MemoRAG: Boosting Long Context Processing with Global Memory-Enhanced Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05591/) (2024)
- [LongRAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Long-context LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15319/) (2024)
- [MedRAG: Enhancing Retrieval-augmented Generation with Knowledge Graph-Elicited Reasoning for Healthcare Copilot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04413/) (2025)
- [StructRAG: Boosting Knowledge Intensive Reasoning of LLMs via Inference-time Hybrid Information Structurization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08815/) (2024)
- [PathRAG: Pruning Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation with Relational Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14902/) (2025)
- [MKRAG: Medical Knowledge Retrieval Augmented Generation for Medical Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16035/) (2023)
- [RAS: Retrieval-And-Structuring for Knowledge-Intensive LLM Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10996/) (2025)
- [Retrieve-Plan-Generation: An Iterative Planning and Answering Framework for Knowledge-Intensive LLM Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14979/) (2024)
- [BioHopR: A Benchmark for Multi-Hop, Multi-Answer Reasoning in Biomedical Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22240/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Retrieval And Structuring Augmented Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10697/) (2025)
- [A Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Mining Method with Deep Thinking LLMs for Biomedical Research and Clinical Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23029/) (2025)
- [Topic Coverage-based Demonstration Retrieval for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12451/) (2025)
- [PairSem: LLM-Guided Pairwise Semantic Matching for Scientific Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09897/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current biomedical question answering (QA) systems often assume that medical knowledge applies uniformly, yet real-world clinical reasoning is inherently conditional: nearly every decision depends on patient-specific factors such as comorbidities and contraindications. Existing benchmarks do not evaluate such conditional reasoning, and retrieval-augmented or graph-based methods lack explicit mechanisms to ensure that retrieved knowledge is applicable to given context. To address this gap, we propose CondMedQA, the first benchmark for conditional biomedical QA, consisting of multi-hop questions whose answers vary with patient conditions. Furthermore, we propose Condition-Gated Reasoning (CGR), a novel framework that constructs condition-aware knowledge graphs and selectively activates or prunes reasoning paths based on query conditions. Our findings show that CGR more reliably selects condition-appropriate answers while matching or exceeding state-of-the-art performance on biomedical QA benchmarks, highlighting the importance of explicitly modeling conditionality for robust medical reasoning.