aiqbench analysis
ActiveMedAgent introduces a cost-aware framework that optimizes diagnostic trajectories by balancing the utility of additional medical evidence against acquisition costs, effectively preventing information overload in multimodal settings. By training a lightweight controller to decide when to request tests versus committing to a diagnosis, the system outperforms both unguided approaches and full-modality baselines across standard benchmarks. This work advances efficient machine learning in high-stakes clinical environments by demonstrating that strategic data omission is as critical as acquisition for accurate outcomes.
ActiveMedAgent: Cost-Aware Trajectory Learning for Multimodal Medical Diagnosis
arXiv:2610.11140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinical diagnosis is inherently sequential: clinicians escalate from cheap to costly tests only when additional evidence is expected to resolve diagnostic uncertainty. We present ActiveMedAgent, a framework that brings this cost-aware sequential logic to multimodal medical AI. Given a frozen, API-accessed vision-language model, ActiveMedAgent tracks probability distributions over candidate diagnoses and scores each acquisition by its per-step diagnostic utility minus cost. A lightweight MLP controller is then trained offline on these scored trajectories, learning when to request additional evidence and when to commit. Across three commonly used benchmarks, trajectory-based policy learning consistently outperforms both unguided acquisition and full-modality baselines. Notably, we identify an information overload effect. In 175 cases, the agent produces a correct diagnosis with fewer channels while the full-modality baseline fails, showing that learning what to omit can be as important as learning what to acquire.
Abstract:Clinical diagnosis is inherently sequential: clinicians escalate from cheap to costly tests only when additional evidence is expected to resolve diagnostic uncertainty. We present ActiveMedAgent, a framework that brings this cost-aware sequential logic to multimodal medical AI. Given a frozen, API-accessed vision-language model, ActiveMedAgent tracks probability distributions over candidate diagnoses and scores each acquisition by its per-step diagnostic utility minus cost. A lightweight MLP controller is then trained offline on these scored trajectories, learning when to request additional evidence and when to commit. Across three commonly used benchmarks, trajectory-based policy learning consistently outperforms both unguided acquisition and full-modality baselines. Notably, we identify an information overload effect. In 175 cases, the agent produces a correct diagnosis with fewer channels while the full-modality baseline fails, showing that learning what to omit can be as important as learning what to acquire.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Multimedia (cs.MM)
arXiv:2610.11140 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2610.11140v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.11140 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 171 words
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