# A Multi-Agent Audit Framework for High-Stakes Reasoning: Evaluation and Interpretability in Clinical Mental Health Screening

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21123 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21123/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 9 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 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)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03714/) (2023)
- [Nomic Embed: Training a Reproducible Long Context Text Embedder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01613/) (2024)
- [Holistic Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09110/) (2022)
- [Integrating Large Language Models into a Tri-Modal Architecture for Automated Depression Classification on the DAIC-WOZ](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19340/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-stakes reasoning tasks necessitate transparent and verifiable workflows, yet conventional single-model large language models (LLMs) often struggle with hallucination and low interpretability under zero-shot paradigms. To address this general AI challenge, we propose a Multi-Agent Audit Framework that simulates a collaborative, multi-step verification process. We empirically validate this architecture in the sensitive domain of clinical mental health screening using a modular LangChain workflow. Our framework decomposes the reasoning process into a Perception Agent, Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Chain-of-Thought (CoT) clinical inference, and a critical Audit verification stage. We evaluated this framework on the DAIC-WOZ dataset using locally deployed open-source models. Experimental results demonstrate that our multi-agent pipeline significantly outperforms single-agent baselines, reducing the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for PHQ-8 depression severity prediction from 5.35 to 5.02. By exposing cross-agent validation traces, the framework mitigates reasoning drift and provides highly interpretable diagnostic rationales, offering a generalizable paradigm for reliable AI-assisted decision support beyond isolated model scaling. We make data and code open access on GitHub for replicability.