Pengfei Hu


2025

pdf bib
MedPlan: A Two-Stage RAG-Based System for Personalized Medical Plan Generation
Hsin-Ling Hsu | Cong-Tinh Dao | Luning Wang | Zitao Shuai | Thao Nguyen Minh Phan | Jun-En Ding | Chun-Chieh Liao | Pengfei Hu | Xiaoxue Han | Chih-Ho Hsu | Dongsheng Luo | Wen-Chih Peng | Feng Liu | Fang-Ming Hung | Chenwei Wu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)

Despite recent success in applying large language models (LLMs) to electronic health records (EHR), most systems focus primarily on assessment rather than treatment planning. We identify three critical limitations in current approaches: they generate treatment plans in a single pass rather than following the sequential reasoning process used by clinicians; they rarely incorporate patient-specific historical context; and they fail to effectively distinguish between subjective and objective clinical information. Motivated by the SOAP methodology (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan), we introduce MedPlan, a novel framework that structures LLM reasoning to align with real-life clinician workflows. Our approach employs a two-stage architecture that first generates a clinical assessment based on patient symptoms and objective data, then formulates a structured treatment plan informed by this assessment and enriched with patient-specific information through retrieval-augmented generation. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches in both assessment accuracy and treatment plan quality. Our demo system and code are available at https://github.com/JustinHsu1019/MedPlan.

pdf bib
No Black Boxes: Interpretable and Interactable Predictive Healthcare with Knowledge-Enhanced Agentic Causal Discovery
Xiaoxue Han | Pengfei Hu | Chang Lu | Jun-En Ding | Feng Liu | Yue Ning
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Deep learning models trained on extensive Electronic Health Records (EHR) data have achieved high accuracy in diagnosis prediction, offering the potential to assist clinicians in decision-making and treatment planning. However, these models lack two crucial features that clinicians highly value: interpretability and interactivity. The “black-box” nature of these models makes it difficult for clinicians to understand the reasoning behind predictions, limiting their ability to make informed decisions. Additionally, the absence of interactive mechanisms prevents clinicians from incorporating their own knowledge and experience into the decision-making process. To address these limitations, we propose II-KEA, a knowledge-enhanced agent-driven causal discovery framework that integrates personalized knowledge databases and agentic LLMs. II-KEA enhances interpretability through explicit reasoning and causal analysis, while also improving interactivity by allowing clinicians to inject their knowledge and experience through customized knowledge bases and prompts. II-KEA is evaluated on both MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, demonstrating superior performance along with enhanced interpretability and interactivity, as evidenced by its strong results from extensive case studies.

2024

pdf bib
UniTabNet: Bridging Vision and Language Models for Enhanced Table Structure Recognition
Zhenrong Zhang | Shuhang Liu | Pengfei Hu | Jiefeng Ma | Jun Du | Jianshu Zhang | Yu Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

In the digital era, table structure recognition technology is a critical tool for processing and analyzing large volumes of tabular data. Previous methods primarily focus on visual aspects of table structure recovery but often fail to effectively comprehend the textual semantics within tables, particularly for descriptive textual cells. In this paper, we introduce UniTabNet, a novel framework for table structure parsing based on the image-to-text model. UniTabNet employs a “divide-and-conquer” strategy, utilizing an image-to-text model to decouple table cells and integrating both physical and logical decoders to reconstruct the complete table structure. We further enhance our framework with the Vision Guider, which directs the model’s focus towards pertinent areas, thereby boosting prediction accuracy. Additionally, we introduce the Language Guider to refine the model’s capability to understand textual semantics in table images. Evaluated on prominent table structure datasets such as PubTabNet, PubTables1M, WTW, and iFLYTAB, UniTabNet achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach. The code will also be made publicly available.