让医疗AI工具学会在出错时互相纠正,提升诊断可靠性。
Mind the Tool Failures: Achieving Synergistic Tool Gains for Medical Agents

- 基于实例级选择,动态调整工具使用策略以应对错误
- 在7个医学基准上显著优于基线,稳定提升诊断准确率
- 适合构建高可靠医疗智能体的研究者与开发者
医疗AI代理越来越多地依赖外部工具进行诊断、治疗推荐和证据检索,但现有方法假设任务相关的工具在适用范围内始终可靠。然而在真实临床场景中,即使相关工具也可能在复杂病例中失效,导致不安全的下游决策。本文研究工具不可靠情况下的医疗工具使用,旨在纠正单个工具遗漏的错误。实例级失效模式造成最佳固定单一工具与理想实例级选择器之间的差距,称为单归约风险差距。传统任务级工具选择无法消除该差距,因其性能受限于最优单工具。为此,本文提出一种基于GRPO的强化学习框架,通过概率风险最小化奖励和异议感知协同学习,促进对错误工具共识的实例级修正。同时采用熵引导采样策略,加权高异议实例以增强学习信号。两项任务与七个医学基准的实验表明,本方法持续优于多种基线,凸显了协同感知工具使用对可靠医疗智能体的重要性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Medical AI agents increasingly use external tools for diagnosis, treatment recommendation, and evidence retrieval, yet most existing approaches assume that task-appropriate tools are reliable within their intended scope. This assumption is fragile in real clinical settings, where even relevant tools may fail on challenging instances and lead to unsafe downstream decisions. To address this issue, we study medical tool use under imperfect-tool settings to correct failure instances missed by individual tools. Instance-dependent failure patterns create a gap between the best fixed single tool and an ideal instance-wise selector, which we refer to as the Single-Oracle risk gap. The core challenge is that conventional task-level tool selection cannot realize this gap, as it is inherently bounded by the performance of the best single tool. Motivated by this observation, we therefore account for instance-level heterogeneity and formulate tool use as an instance-level selection problem. Particularly, we propose a GRPO-based reinforcement learning framework with rewards for probabilistic risk minimization and disagreement-aware synergy learning, which promotes instance-level correction of erroneous tool consensus. Furthermore, an entropy-guided sampling strategy is adopted to upweight high-disagreement instances, which provide stronger signals for learning instance-specific tool synergy. These two components complement each other in mitigating instance-level heterogeneity and improving tool synergy. Experiments on two tasks and seven medical benchmarks show that our method consistently achieves robust and stable improvements over a broad range of baselines, highlighting the importance of synergy-aware tool use for reliable medical agentic systems.
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