Papers › Talk Before You Retrieve: Agent-Led Discussions for Better RAG in Medical QA

Talk Before You Retrieve: Agent-Led Discussions for Better RAG in Medical QA

30 Apr 2025arXiv:2504.21252archive 2025-07-28

Xuanzhao Dong, Wenhui Zhu, Hao Wang, Xiwen Chen, Peijie Qiu, Rui Yin, Yi Su, Yalin Wang

Medical question answering (QA) is a reasoning-intensive task that remains challenging for large language models (LLMs) due to hallucinations and outdated domain knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) provides a promising post-training solution by leveraging external knowledge. However, existing medical RAG systems suffer from two key limitations: (1) a lack of modeling for human-like reasoning behaviors during information retrieval, and (2) reliance on suboptimal medical corpora, which often results in the retrieval of irrelevant or noisy snippets. To overcome these challenges, we propose Discuss-RAG, a plug-and-play module designed to enhance the medical QA RAG system through collaborative agent-based reasoning. Our method introduces a summarizer agent that orchestrates a team of medical experts to emulate multi-turn brainstorming, thereby improving the relevance of retrieved content. Additionally, a decision-making agent evaluates the retrieved snippets before their final integration. Experimental results on four benchmark medical QA datasets show that Discuss-RAG consistently outperforms MedRAG, especially significantly improving answer accuracy by up to 16.67% on BioASQ and 12.20% on PubMedQA. The code is available at: https://github.com/LLM-VLM-GSL/Discuss-RAG.

Paper PDF Code

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

llm-vlm-gsl/discuss-rag officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Information Retrieval Question Answering RAG Retrieval Retrieval-augmented Generation

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Adam Attention Attention Dropout BART BERT BPE Dense Connections Dropout Layer Normalization Linear Layer Linear Warmup With Linear Decay Multi-Head Attention RAG Residual Connection Softmax Weight Decay WordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections