Licheng Zong

Author directory

2026

Recommending medications from electronic health records (EHRs) is a safety-critical task that demands therapeutic coverage, explicit safety constraints, traceable justification, and continual adaptivity. Supervised neural models freeze at deployment and cannot reason about new phenotypes, while existing LLM pipelines are single-pass and lack a cross-case improvement loop. We propose **SEMPA**, a training-free agentic framework that couples a Proposer with a Critic in multi-round adversarial deliberation, grounds candidates with molecular-aware retrieval, contrastively evolves both agents’ natural-language policies under a semantic-anchor constraint, and enforces rule-based DDI and contraindication checks. On 100 MIMIC-IV encounters, SEMPA reaches 0.3116 Jaccard, 0.7295 F1, and a 0.0172 DDI rate, improving F1 by 57.7% and cutting DDI by 77.5% over the strongest supervised baseline. Two LLM judges rank SEMPA highest, and six-backbone studies confirm that gains derive from the framework rather than a specific model.

2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in the biomedical domain with the advancement of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, existing retrieval-augmented approaches face challenges in addressing diverse queries and documents, particularly for medical knowledge queries, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel plug-and-play LLM-based retrieval method called Self-Rewarding Tree Search (SeRTS) based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and a self-rewarding paradigm. By combining the reasoning capabilities of LLMs with the effectiveness of tree search, SeRTS boosts the zero-shot performance of retrieving high-quality and informative results for RAG. We further enhance retrieval performance by fine-tuning LLMs with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) objectives using the trajectories collected by SeRTS as feedback. Controlled experiments using the BioASQ-QA dataset with GPT-3.5-Turbo and LLama2-7b demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of the BM25 retriever and surpasses the strong baseline of self-reflection in both efficiency and scalability. Moreover, SeRTS generates higher-quality feedback for PPO training than self-reflection. Our proposed method effectively adapts LLMs to document retrieval tasks, enhancing their ability to retrieve highly relevant documents for RAG in the context of medical knowledge queries. This work presents a significant step forward in leveraging LLMs for accurate and comprehensive biomedical question answering.