@inproceedings{liang-etal-2025-rgar,
    title = "{RGAR}: Recurrence Generation-augmented Retrieval for Factual-aware Medical Question Answering",
    author = "Liang, Sichu  and
      Zhang, Linhai  and
      Zhu, Hongyu  and
      Wang, Wenwen  and
      He, Yulan  and
      Zhou, Deyu",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.214/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.214",
    pages = "4006--4033",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "Medical question answering fundamentally relies on accurate clinical knowledge. The dominant paradigm, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), acquires expertise \textit{conceptual} knowledge from large-scale medical corpus to guide general-purpose large language models (LLMs) in generating trustworthy answers. However, existing retrieval approaches often overlook the patient-specific \textit{factual knowledge} embedded in Electronic Health Records (EHRs), which limits the contextual relevance of retrieved \textit{conceptual knowledge} and hinders its effectiveness in vital clinical decision-making. This paper introduces RGAR, a recurrence generation-augmented retrieval framework that synergistically retrieves both \textit{factual} and \textit{conceptual} knowledge from dual sources (i.e., EHRs and the corpus), allowing mutual refinement through iterative interaction. Across three factual-aware medical QA benchmarks, RGAR establishes new state-of-the-art performance among medical RAG systems. Notably, RGAR enables the Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model to surpass the considerably larger GPT-3.5 augmented with traditional RAG. Our findings demonstrate the benefit of explicitly mining patient-specific factual knowledge during retrieval, consistently improving generation quality and clinical relevance."
}