AgentEHR: Advancing Autonomous Clinical Decision-Making via Retrospective Summarization

Yusheng Liao, Chuan Xuan, Yutong Cai, Lina Yang, Zhe Chen, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang


Abstract
Large Language Models have demonstrated profound utility in the medical domain. However, their application to autonomous Electronic Health Records (EHRs) navigation remains constrained by a reliance on curated inputs and simplified retrieval tasks. To bridge the gap between idealized experimental settings and realistic clinical environments, we present AgentEHR. This benchmark challenges agents to execute complex decision-making tasks, such as diagnosis and treatment planning, requiring long-range interactive reasoning directly within raw and high-noise databases. In tackling these tasks, we identify that existing summarization methods inevitably suffer from critical information loss and fractured reasoning continuity. To address this, we propose RetroSum, a novel framework that unifies a retrospective summarization mechanism with an evolving experience strategy. By dynamically re-evaluating interaction history, the retrospective mechanism prevents long-context information loss and ensures unbroken logical coherence. Additionally, the evolving strategy bridges the domain gap by retrieving accumulated experience from a memory bank. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that RetroSum achieves performance gains of up to 29.16% over competitive baselines, while significantly decreasing total interaction errors by up to 92.3%.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1529
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
34870–34917
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1529/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yusheng Liao, Chuan Xuan, Yutong Cai, Lina Yang, Zhe Chen, Yanfeng Wang, and Yu Wang. 2026. AgentEHR: Advancing Autonomous Clinical Decision-Making via Retrospective Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 34870–34917, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AgentEHR: Advancing Autonomous Clinical Decision-Making via Retrospective Summarization (Liao et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1529.pdf