# CoLa-ICD: A Knowledge-Enhanced Framework for Long-Tail Automated Medical Coding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30234 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30234/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Self-Alignment Pretraining for Biomedical Entity Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11784/) (2020)
- [Explainable Prediction of Medical Codes from Clinical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05695/) (2018)
- [ICD Coding from Clinical Text Using Multi-Filter Residual Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00862/) (2019)
- [Code Synonyms Do Matter: Multiple Synonyms Matching Network for Automatic ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01515/) (2022)
- [Automated Medical Coding on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV: A Critical Review and Replicability Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10909/) (2023)
- [A Label Attention Model for ICD Coding from Clinical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06351/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Injected Prompt Based Fine-tuning for Multi-label Few-shot ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03304/) (2022)
- [BERT-XML: Large Scale Automated ICD Coding Using BERT Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03685/) (2020)
- [A Unified Review of Deep Learning for Automated Medical Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02797/) (2022)
- [Dilated Convolutional Attention Network for Medical Code Assignment from Clinical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14578/) (2020)
- [CoRelation: Boosting Automatic ICD Coding Through Contextualized Code Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15700/) (2024)
- [TransICD: Transformer Based Code-wise Attention Model for Explainable ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10652/) (2021)
- [Can GPT-3.5 Generate and Code Discharge Summaries?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13512/) (2024)
- [Code Like Humans: A Multi-Agent Solution for Medical Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05378/) (2025)
- [A General Knowledge Injection Framework for ICD Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18708/) (2025)
- [Faithful Evaluation of Semantic-ID Tokenizers for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25330/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic medical coding assigns ICD codes to clinical notes, but it remains challenging due to long documents, imbalanced label distributions, and diverse terms. These challenges are especially severe for rare codes, which have limited training instances and are easily confused with semantically similar labels. We introduce CoLa-ICD, a knowledge-enhanced framework for long-tail prediction. CoLa-ICD enriches ICD labels with external terms, models dependencies among related codes, and learns stronger alignment between label semantics and clinical evidence for long-tail prediction. Experiments show that CoLa-ICD improves long-tail prediction with larger gains in larger and sparser label spaces and achieves state-of-the-art performance in AUC, F1, and P@k. Our code is available at https://github.com/youwillbethebest/Cola-ICD.