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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24481 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24481/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Clinical and biomedical applications](https://mlsanity.com/lr/clinical-and-biomedical-applications/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Medical and scientific domain agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/medical-and-scientific-domain-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [A Gentle Introduction to Conformal Prediction and Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07511/) (2021)
- [Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13375/) (2023)
- [Mixture-of-Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04692/) (2024)
- [Beyond Direct Diagnosis: LLM-based Multi-Specialist Agent Consultation for Automatic Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16107/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Estimation of Large Language Models in Medical Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08662/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Uncertainty Quantification for LLM Agents: A Taxonomy, an Evaluation Protocol, and an Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07395/) (2026)
- [VeriDx: Earning the Right to Diagnose with Disease-Centric Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14018/) (2026)

## 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.