Large language models (LLMs) show strong performance in medical question answering, but their computational costs limit deployment under resource constraints. Therefore, an increasing number of studies focus on distilling knowledge from LLMs into smaller models to improve performance in medical question answering. However, existing methods often fail to identify truly useful knowledge to distill, making it difficult to focus distillation on the student’s real weaknesses. As a result, much of the distillation budget is spent on already acquired knowledge rather than on weaknesses that still limit performance. To address this problem, we propose LEAD, a Learnable Error-Aware Distillation framework that precisely improves the weaknesses of student models. First, LEAD identifies questions answered incorrectly by the student model to determine which weaknesses require teacher guidance. Then, LEAD generates teacher rationales and similar samples to construct candidate supervision for these errors. Through supervision refinement, reliable and learnable training samples are retained from the candidate supervision. Finally, LEAD trains the student on a balanced sample mixture to correct learnable errors while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Experiments on four medical question answering benchmarks show that LEAD outperforms existing distillation methods.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucinations in large language models by incorporating external knowledge. However, retrieval does not always return relevant documents and may return noisy ones. Indiscriminately retrieving and utilizing this external knowledge can interfere with the model’s originally correct reasoning. In this work, we propose Dual-Decision Retrieval-Augmented Generation (D²-RAG), which integrates multi-dimensional uncertainty estimation to decide whether to retrieve and employs adaptive contrastive decoding to handle retrieved contexts of varying quality. Specifically, we first integrate uncertainty estimation scores that assess model uncertainty from multiple perspectives, construct them into a comprehensive feature vector, and train a lightweight retrieval decision model to accurately identify the model’s knowledge boundaries and determine whether to retrieve. Subsequently, we dynamically adjust the contrastive decoding strategy based on the utility of retrieved contexts to enhance the utilization of relevant contexts while suppressing interference from noisy contexts. Extensive experiments on four medical question-answering datasets demonstrate that D²-RAG significantly outperforms baselines, enabling retrieval-augmented Llama3.1-8B to surpass non-retrieval-augmented Llama3.1-70B on the MedMCQA dataset. The source code is available on https://github.com/zakelawen/d--rag.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities, but hallucinations and unverifiable intermediate reasoning steps remain key challenges. In knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), entity-relation paths from knowledge graphs (KGs) provide structured and verifiable evidence for grounded reasoning. However, existing KG-enhanced LLM methods commonly linearize all retrieved reasoning paths into textual prompts, introducing noise and underexploiting their ordered structure. To address these limitations, we propose PathSoft, a hybrid soft prompting framework that combines textual path evidence with soft prompts. PathSoft first employs PathMLP to select reliable reasoning paths, and then uses PathSoftAdapter to convert the selected paths into continuous soft prompts while preserving their ordered path structure. Finally, the resulting soft prompt tokens are combined with the textual prompt at the embedding layer of the frozen LLM, enabling it to exploit both readable path evidence and path structure information. Experiments on WebQSP and CWQ show that PathSoft outperforms existing KGQA baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/tengyan1786-blip/PathSoft.

Automated ICD coding is a critical task for standardizing clinical information from electronic health records (EHRs) and supporting downstream healthcare administration.However, existing automated ICD coding systems face several fundamental challenges. First, the majority of existing research focuses on English ICD tasks, with limited attention to Chinese-language clinical contexts due to the scarcity of publicly available Chinese ICD datasets. Second, most approaches primarily target disease coding, overlooking procedure coding as well as the multi-stage workflows followed in real-world clinical practice. Moreover, many recent methods rely heavily on closed-source large language models or substantial computational resources, which limits their scalability and deployability in clinical environments.To address these gaps, this paper proposes JointCoder, which includes a real-world Chinese ICD coding dataset and a multi-agent framework that reformulates automated ICD coding as a joint disease-procedure coding task. JointCoder explicitly models real-world clinical coding workflows through stage-wise agent collaboration.All agents are instantiated using locally deployed 1.7B-parameter models, enabling scalable and privacy-preserving deployment.Extensive experiments on real-world Chinese ICD coding datasets demonstrate JointCoder’s superiority over state-of-the-art baselines across all evaluation metrics.

“中文电子病历国际疾病分类(ICD)诊断编码评测依托第二十四届中国计算语言学大会(CCL)举办。该评测聚焦于自然语言处理技术在智能医疗领域的应用,旨在从真实脱敏的电子病历文本中自动分析关键临床表征,实现主诊断及其他诊断ICD编码的精准预测与分配,从而辅助临床医生与专业编码员提升编码工作的准确性和效率。本次评测在阿里云天池平台进行,获得了学术界与工业界的广泛关注和积极参与。数据显示,共有445支队伍报名参赛,其中A榜和B榜分别有85支和36支队伍成功提交了有效结果。最终,8支表现优异的队伍受邀撰写并分享了其技术报告,为推动该领域的技术进步与方法创新贡献了宝贵经验。本次评测的详细信息可参见相关发布页面。”