arXiv:2608.24521cs.CL2026-08

让医疗对话系统更关注严重疾病,减少漏诊风险。

Beyond Information Seeking: Severity-Aware Question Supervision for Proactive Medical Dialogue

论文配图:Beyond Information Seeking: Severity-Aware Question Supervision for Proactive Medical Dialogue
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用严重性加权的提问策略,优先选择能降低严重后果风险的问题。
  • 在三个训练种子下,严重漏诊率下降29.5%,诊断准确率提升至93.20%。
  • 适合需要高可靠性医疗决策的场景,如智能问诊系统优化。

主动式医疗对话需基于不完整病患信息决定下一步提问。现有信息获取方法通常优先选择最能降低诊断不确定性的提问,但忽略了医学诊断中不同错误的后果差异:遗漏严重疾病的影响远大于缓解轻微病症的不确定性。因此,提问应同时考虑证据的增益和对后续诊断结果的影响。为此,本文提出期望严重性风险(ESR)目标,根据每个候选问题对终局严重性风险的预期降低程度进行评分。由于问题需在答案未知时选择,ESR利用仅训练阶段的群体统计信息对可能答案进行边缘化。其排序结果被提炼为前缀-仅语言策略,部署时无需教师端计算。在DDxPlus数据集上,使用三个Qwen3-4B训练种子,匹配的ESR监督使平均严重漏诊率从0.0645降至0.0455(-29.5%),诊断准确率从0.9123提升至0.9320,且每轮对话仅增加0.14个问题。固定预算分析显示,两种目标在控制提问数量时仍行为迥异;与期望0/1风险对照组相比,严重性感知加权显著改善了高严重性错误分布。结果支持将主动医疗对话从单纯降低不确定性转向后果感知的证据采集。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Proactive medical dialogue requires an agent to decide what to ask from incomplete patient information. Existing information-seeking approaches commonly prioritize questions that most reduce diagnostic uncertainty. While effective for acquiring informative evidence, this criterion overlooks an important property of medical diagnosis: different diagnostic errors can carry substantially different consequences. Missing a severe condition may matter more than reducing uncertainty among less consequential alternatives. Question acquisition should therefore consider not only how informative new evidence is, but also how it is expected to affect the downstream diagnostic decision. To this end, we propose Expected-Severity-Risk (ESR), a consequence-aware question-supervision objective that values each candidate by its expected reduction in severity-aware terminal risk. Because questions must be selected before their answers are observed, ESR marginalizes over possible answers using train-only population statistics. Its rankings are then distilled into a prefix-only language policy, so next-question selection requires no teacher-side computation at deployment. Across three Qwen3-4B training seeds on DDxPlus, matched ESR supervision reduces mean high-severity diagnostic miss from .0645 to .0455 (-29.5%) and improves mean diagnostic accuracy from .9123 to .9320 while requiring only 0.14 additional questions per dialogue. Fixed-budget analyses show that the two objectives remain behaviorally distinct when question count is controlled, while a matched expected-0/1-risk control shows that severity-aware weighting improves the high-severity error profile beyond generic decision-aware supervision. These results support moving proactive medical dialogue beyond uncertainty reduction toward consequence-aware evidence acquisition.

医疗对话严重性感知主动提问决策优化

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