Medical QA

QA: Question Answering

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Overview

Medical question answering studies how AI systems answer exam-style questions, patient inquiries, clinical queries, and multi-turn conversations, sometimes using records, images, or audio. Common approaches include retrieval-augmented generation, medical-domain fine-tuning, chain-of-thought and agent-based reasoning, and reinforcement learning with clinical rubrics. Evaluation uses multiple-choice and open-ended benchmarks such as MedQA, PubMedQA, and patient-query datasets, increasingly testing grounding, safety, calibration, multilingual ability, and performance across modalities. A central challenge is that gains on exams or automatic metrics do not guarantee accurate, unbiased, well-calibrated answers in real clinical settings, where uncertainty, missing context, and harmful errors matter.

Latest papers

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84 papers10 papers in the last four weeks, up 11% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. HerHealthGPT: An Evidence-Grounded Conversational AI System for Women's Reproductive Health Copy title

    Oct 24, 2026Hassan Saeed Hassan Albattra, Mazen Mohammed Bahgat, Rahatara Ferdousi +2HealthcareMedical QA

    School of Computing, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

  2. Are We Done with UMLS Injection into Language Models for Medical Question Answering?

    Oct 24, 2026Yiran Zeng, Giacomo Frisoni, Lorenzo Molfetta +1Knowledge Augmentation for Language ModelsMedical QA

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Italy

  3. AusClinBench: a deterministically scored benchmark of large language models against current Australian clinical policy

    Oct 22, 2026Daniel S. EpsteinClinical Language Model EvaluationClinical QA

    Department of General Practice, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia · The Long Game Project, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

  4. Would an LLM Match into a Residency? Uncertainty, Reasoning and Image Use of Open Language Models on the Spanish MIR Examination

    Oct 22, 2026Miguel Fernandez-de-Retana, Unai Zulaika, Ruben Sanchez-Corcuera +2Clinical Language Model EvaluationMedical QA

    Faculty of Engineering, University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain)

  5. Medical Fine-Tuning Reshapes, Not Reduces, Patient-Facing AI Risk: A Rubric-Based, LLM-Judge Evaluation Framework

    Oct 17, 2026Savan DoshiLanguage Model Safety EvaluationMedical QA

  6. MedSonor: Learning to Use Clinical Audio in Medical LLMs

    Oct 14, 2026Geyang Yu, Junying Chen, Benyou WangMedical LLMsAudio-Language Models

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

  7. ECG-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Targeted Electrocardiogram Waveform Evolution

    Oct 13, 2026Xiaoliang Wang, Zhuo Chen, Chuanyang Zheng +8Language Model Self-ImprovementElectrocardiogram Classification

    Zhejiang University · Ant Group · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory +1

  8. Dissociating Answerability from Extraction in LLM Question Answering over Radiology Reports

    Oct 13, 2026Priyanshu Sinha, Kelsey McDonaldMedical QARadiology Report Evaluation

    Labcorp, Durham, NC

  9. Audit Before You Distill: A Controlled Workflow for Reasoning Transfer into Compact Medical Language Models

    Oct 12, 2026Tiago Martinelli, João Paulo Papa, Adriano José PereiraLanguage Model DistillationMedical LLMs

    Einstein Global Advanced Technologies for Equity (E-GATE), Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein, São Paulo, Brazil · Institute of Science and Technology Itaú (ICTi), Itaú Unibanco, São Paulo, SP, Brazil · School of Sciences, São Paulo State University, São Paulo, Brazil

  10. Conditional Rank Allocation for Taxonomy-Aware Medical Language Model Adaptation

    Oct 5, 2026Guangyuan Dong, Ziwei Hong, Xuehao Zhou +6Low-Rank AdaptationDomain Adaptation for LLMs

    National University of Singapore, Singapore · University of Pennsylvania, USA · Department of Urology, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai, China +3

  11. Jev in Medicine: A Benchmark Evaluation

    Sep 27, 2026Alfredo Madrid-García, Beatriz Merino-BarbanchoMedical QAClinical Reasoning

    Independent researcher, Madrid, Spain

  12. MedRouter: Demystifying Knowledge Differences Across Medical LLMs for Routing-Based Reasoning

    Sep 27, 2026Lang Cao, Binghang Lu, Yuhao Shen +1LLM RoutingMedical QA

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Purdue University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

  13. TCMQA: A 38K-Question Traditional Chinese Medicine Benchmark with a Licensed-Practitioner Reference

    Sep 26, 2026Tzu-Heng Huang, Jet Lin, Eric LinTraditional Chinese MedicineMedical QA

    University of Wisconsin-Madison · University of California, Merced · TechTCM

  14. CRISS: A Retrieval-Augmented AI Chatbot for Assisting Cancer Registrars

    Sep 24, 2026Vani Seth, Mohammad Beheshti, Anirudh Kambhampati +4Retrieval-Augmented GenerationHuman-in-the-Loop AI

    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA · Missouri Cancer Registry and Research Center, Department of Public Health, College of Health Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA · MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA

  15. Rewarding Reasoning, Not Answers: Fixing and Bounding Test-Time Reinforcement Learning on Medical QA

    Sep 15, 2026Kailong Fan, Anqi Pu, Yichen Wu +7Process Reward ModelsRL for Language Model Reasoning

    1Harvard Medical School/MGH · 3Harvard University · 2Zhejiang University

  16. An Empirical Study of Development-Tuned Representation Sensitivity for Medical QA Data Selection

    Sep 9, 2026Yuexin Wu, Dayou Yu, Vasile RusData SelectionMedical QA

    Department of Computer Science, University of Memphis

  17. WearableQA: A Benchmark for Health Reasoning over Real-World Wearable Data

    Sep 4, 2026Ji Soo Lee, Xilun Chen, Pierce Chuang +5Medical QAWearable Health Monitoring

    Meta · KAIST · Korea University

  18. Untangling the Mechanisms of Misleading Context in Medical Question Answering

    Sep 2, 2026Robin Linzmayer, Noémie ElhadadMedical QALanguage Model Robustness

    Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA · Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

  19. ECGQuest: Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning Language Models for Electrocardiography

    Aug 31, 2026Mohammadsina Hassannia, Matthew A. Reyna, Reza SameniElectrocardiographyLLM Fine-Tuning

    Department of Biomedical Informatics Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322, USA · Department of Biomedical Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology and Department of Biomedical Informatics Emory University Atlanta, GA 30332, USA

  20. Gated Activation Steering for Reducing Sycophancy & Hallucination in Medical Question Answering

    Aug 24, 2026Himanshu Tripathi, Subash Neupane, Shaswata Mitra +3LLM SycophancyLLM Hallucination Mitigation

    Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

  21. Performance of a domain-specific large language model in answering patient questions in psychiatry

    Aug 24, 2026Alexander J. Hish, Arjun Nagendran, Scott N. ComptonMedical LLMsMedical QA

    Pritzker Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA · Relativ.ai, USA · Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA

  22. A knowledge-guided agentic framework for mitigating patient-context ambiguity in health queries

    Aug 20, 2026Mahyar Abbasian, Saba A. Farahani, Arshia Ilaty +3Medical QAClarification Question Generation

  23. Adaptive Memory and Reflection Multi-Agent System for Medical Question Answering

    Aug 19, 2026Pradeep Murugesan, Luoxiao Yang, Xueli Chen +1Medical QABiomedical QA

    School of Computing and Mathematics, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK · Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel · School of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong Kong SAR

  24. ConRub-Med: Reinforcement Learning with Consensus Rubrics for Open-Ended Medical Question Answering

    Aug 11, 2026Taojie Zhu, Yuan Xia, Tao Sun +8Rubric-Based RLMedical QA

    Tsinghua University · Ant Group · Zhejiang University

  25. Gaokerena: A Small Persian Medical Language Model Family

    Aug 2, 2026Mehrdad Ghassabi, Hamidreza Baradaran Kashani, Pedram Rostami +5RL for Language Model ReasoningSmall Language Models

    University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran · University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran · University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada +3

  26. Bridging the English-Arabic Medical Knowledge Gap: Targeted Low-Rank Adaptation via Causal Layer Selection

    Jul 31, 2026Chaimae Abouzahir, Musa Khan, Hala Ali-Hassan +7LLM Fine-TuningLow-Rank Adaptation

    New York University Abu Dhabi · Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi

  27. MedLLM: An Open Medical Language Model at the Sub-Billion Scale

    Jul 29, 2026Maxx Richard Rahman, Asim Ahmed, Mihan Mohagheghzadeh +1LLM Fine-TuningSmall Language Models

    German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany · Saarland University, Germany

  28. MedJudgeRAG: Option-Wise Evidence Judgment with Dynamic Knowledge Graphs for Medical MCQA

    Jul 24, 2026Seongwon Seo, Seung Hwan Cho, Young-Min KimGraph Retrieval-Augmented GenerationMedical QA

    Department of Industrial Data Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea · School of Interdisciplinary Industrial Studies, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

  29. Clinically Structured Rank-Gated LoRA for Cross-Benchmark Medical Question Answering

    Jun 30, 2026Hao Gong, Ruilin Gong, Yining HuangNonlinear LoRALow-Rank Adaptation

    University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Henan University of Technology · Meta Emergence Laboratory

  30. DEEPMED Search: An Open-Source Agentic Platform for Medical Deep Research with Introspective Verification

    Jun 29, 2026Maolin Liu, Fanyu Xu, Ruoqing Xu +3LLM Answer VerificationAgentic Search

    School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shanghai University · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University