ArgMed-Agents: Explainable Clinical Decision Reasoning with LLM Disscusion via Argumentation Schemes

TL;DR

This paper introduces ArgMed-Agents, a multi-agent framework that enhances explainability and accuracy in clinical decision-making by modeling reasoning as argumentation, thus improving trust and interpretability of LLMs in healthcare.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-agent argumentation-based approach for LLMs to perform explainable clinical reasoning with formal guarantees.

Findings

Improves accuracy in complex clinical reasoning tasks.

Provides interpretable explanations that increase user confidence.

Models reasoning as directed graphs of conflicting arguments.

Abstract

There are two main barriers to using large language models (LLMs) in clinical reasoning. Firstly, while LLMs exhibit significant promise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, their performance in complex reasoning and planning falls short of expectations. Secondly, LLMs use uninterpretable methods to make clinical decisions that are fundamentally different from the clinician's cognitive processes. This leads to user distrust. In this paper, we present a multi-agent framework called ArgMed-Agents, which aims to enable LLM-based agents to make explainable clinical decision reasoning through interaction. ArgMed-Agents performs self-argumentation iterations via Argumentation Scheme for Clinical Discussion (a reasoning mechanism for modeling cognitive processes in clinical reasoning), and then constructs the argumentation process as a directed graph representing conflicting relationships. Ultimately, use symbolic solver to identify a series of rational and coherent arguments to support decision. We construct a formal model of ArgMed-Agents and present conjectures for theoretical guarantees. ArgMed-Agents enables LLMs to mimic the process of clinical argumentative reasoning by generating explanations of reasoning in a self-directed manner. The setup experiments show that ArgMed-Agents not only improves accuracy in complex clinical decision reasoning problems compared to other prompt methods, but more importantly, it provides users with decision explanations that increase their confidence.