MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning

Xiangru Tang, Anni Zou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ziming Li, Yilun Zhao, Xingyao Zhang, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein

Keywords: large language models, medical question answering

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable progress across various general domains, encounter significant barriers in medicine and healthcare. This field faces unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and reasoning over specialized knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a novel Multi-disciplinary Collaboration (MC) framework for the medical domain that leverages role-playing LLM-based agents who participate in a collaborative multi-round discussion, thereby enhancing LLM proficiency and reasoning capabilities. This training-free and interpretable framework encompasses five critical steps: gathering domain experts, proposing individual analyses, summarising these analyses into a report, iterating over discussions until a consensus is reached, and ultimately making a decision. Our work focuses on the zero-shot setting, which is applicable in real-world scenarios. Experimental results on nine datasets (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and six subtasks from MMLU) establish that our proposed MC framework excels at mining and harnessing the medical expertise within LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities.

Submission Number: 124