mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Multi-Agent Reasoning with Consistency Verification Improves Uncertainty Calibration in Medical MCQA

arXiv 2603.24481 ↗First posted 25 Mar 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.LGcited by 2

On the map: LLM reasoning → Clinical and biomedical applications

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Miscalibrated confidence scores are a practical obstacle to deploying AI in clinical settings. A model that is always overconfident offers no useful signal for deferral. We present a multi-agent framework that combines domain-specific specialist agents with Two-Phase Verification (Wu et al., 2024) and S-Score Weighted Fusion to improve both calibration and discrimination in medical multiple-choice question answering. Four specialist agents (respiratory, cardiology, neurology, gastroenterology) generate independent diagnoses using Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. Each diagnosis undergoes a two-phase self-verification process that measures internal consistency and produces a Specialist Confidence Score (S-score). The S-scores drive a weighted fusion strategy that selects the final answer and calibrates the reported confidence. We evaluate on high-disagreement subsets of MedQA-USMLE and MedMCQA (100 and 250 questions). All results are specific to this filtered regime. On MedQA-250, the full system achieves ECE = 0.091 (74.4% reduction over the single-specialist baseline) and AUROC = 0.630 (+0.056) at 59.2% accuracy. Calibration gains of 49-74% hold across all four settings. Ablation analysis reveals that Two-Phase Verification drives ECE reduction while multi-agent reasoning drives AUROC improvement, suggesting that consistency checking and ensemble aggregation address different failure modes of LLM uncertainty. Whether the resulting confidence signal is sufficient to support clinical deferral decisions in practice remains a direction for future investigation.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 9 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.

Builds on

9 of 24 references.

References · 9

  1. 2024Qwen2.5 Technical Reportcited by 4,713
  2. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  3. 2022Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Knowcited by 1,783
  4. 2023Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMscited by 946
  5. 2021A Gentle Introduction to Conformal Prediction and Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantificationcited by 777
  6. 2023Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problemscited by 630
  7. 2024Mixture-of-Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilitiescited by 420
  8. 2024Beyond Direct Diagnosis: LLM-based Multi-Specialist Agent Consultation for Automatic Diagnosiscited by 23
  9. 2024Uncertainty Estimation of Large Language Models in Medical Question Answeringcited by 10

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Let LLMs Judge Each Other: Multi-Agent Peer-Reviewed Reasoning for Medical Question Answering
  2. 2026A Multi-Agent Framework for Medical AI: Leveraging Fine-Tuned GPT, LLaMA, and DeepSeek R1 for Evidence-Based and Bias-Aware Clinical Query Processing
  3. 2026The Consistency Illusion: How Multi-Agent Debate Hides Reasoning Misalignment
  4. 2025MedLA: A Logic-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Complex Medical Reasoning with Large Language Models
  5. 2025CURE: Confidence-driven Unified Reasoning Ensemble Framework for Medical Question Answering
  6. 2025MedMMV: A Controllable Multimodal Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable and Verifiable Clinical Reasoning
  7. 2025MedicalAgentsBench for Complex Medical Reasoning: Comparing Internalized Reasoning Models versus Externalized Agent-based Frameworks
  8. 2026From Conflict to Consensus: Boosting Medical Reasoning via Multi-Round Agentic RAG