# ClinSeekAgent: Automating Multimodal Evidence Seeking for Agentic Clinical Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20176 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20176/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 23 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 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, 23 of 23)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02276/) (2026)
- [MedGemma Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05201/) (2025)
- [AgentClinic: a multimodal agent benchmark to evaluate AI in simulated clinical environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07960/) (2024)
- [MedXpertQA: Benchmarking Expert-Level Medical Reasoning and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18362/) (2025)
- [HuatuoGPT, towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15075/) (2023)
- [MedReason: Eliciting Factual Medical Reasoning Steps in LLMs via Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00993/) (2025)
- [MedRAX: Medical Reasoning Agent for Chest X-ray](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02673/) (2025)
- [m1: Unleash the Potential of Test-Time Scaling for Medical Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00869/) (2025)
- [MedFrameQA: A Multi-Image Medical VQA Benchmark for Clinical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16964/) (2025)
- [MedVLThinker: Simple Baselines for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02669/) (2025)
- [FHIR-AgentBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Realistic Interoperable EHR Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19319/) (2025)
- [EHR-R1: A Reasoning-Enhanced Foundational Language Model for Electronic Health Record Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25628/) (2025)
- [Knowledge or Reasoning? A Close Look at How LLMs Think Across Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02126/) (2025)
- [OctoMed: Data Recipes for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23269/) (2025)
- [MTBBench: A Multimodal Sequential Clinical Decision-Making Benchmark in Oncology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20490/) (2025)
- [DEEPMED: Building a Medical DeepResearch Agent via Multi-hop Med-Search Data and Turn-Controlled Agentic Training & Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18496/) (2026)
- [MedXIAOHE: A Comprehensive Recipe for Building Medical MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12705/) (2026)
- [Meissa: Multi-modal Medical Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09018/) (2026)
- [AgentEHR: Advancing Autonomous Clinical Decision-Making via Retrospective Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13918/) (2026)
- [EHRNavigator: A Multi-Agent System for Patient-Level Clinical Question Answering over Heterogeneous Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10020/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [The Path to Self-Evolving Clinical Systems: Scaling Medical Agents from Assistance to Autonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11175/) (2026)
- [BaT: Towards Self-Evolving Medical Research Agent with Stage Rubrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16211/) (2026)
- [MammoClaw: Towards Skill-Evolving Agent Harness for Breast Cancer Mammography Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31789/) (2026)
- [JockeyBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Horse-Racing Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19589/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems have shown promise for clinical decision support, but existing works largely assume that evidence has already been curated and handed to the model. Real-world clinical workflows instead require agents to actively seek, iteratively plan, and synthesize multimodal evidence from heterogeneous sources. In this paper, we introduce ClinSeekAgent, an automated agentic framework for dynamic multimodal evidence seeking that shifts the paradigm from passive evidence consumption to active evidence acquisition. Given only a clinical query and access to raw data sources, ClinSeekAgent gathers evidence by querying medical knowledge bases, navigating raw EHRs, and invoking medical imaging tools; refines its hypotheses as new information emerges; and integrates the collected evidence into grounded clinical decisions. ClinSeekAgent serves both as an inference-time agent for frontier LLMs and as a training-time pipeline for distilling high-quality agent trajectories into compact open-source models. To validate its inference-time effectiveness, we construct ClinSeek-Bench, which pairs Curated Input reasoning from fixed pre-selected evidence with Automated Evidence-Seeking over raw clinical data. On text-only EHR tasks, ClinSeekAgent improves Claude Opus 4.6 from 60.0 to 63.2 overall F1 and MiniMax M2.5 from 43.1 to 47.3, with positive risk-prediction gains in 7 out of 9 evaluated host models. On multimodal tasks, ClinSeekAgent improves Claude Opus 4.6 from 47.5 to 62.6 (+15.1); all evaluated models improve across the three CXR-related task groups. We further validate ClinSeekAgent as a training pipeline by distilling agentic evidence-seeking trajectories into ClinSeek-35B-A3B, which achieves 34.0 average F1 on existing AgentEHR-Bench, improving over its Qwen3.5-35B-A3B baseline by +11.9 points and approaching Claude Opus 4.6.