CAMEC: Complexity-Aware Multi-Expert Collaboration for Reliable Chinese Medical Question Answering

Yukang Wu, Xiyuan Jia, Jiayi Wu, HongChen Yu, Yuhan Qiu, Wu Guohua


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are promising for medical question answering (QA) but remain unreliable in Chinese clinical settings due to hallucinations, weak factual grounding, and difficulty handling clinically complex cases. We propose CAMEC (Complexity-Aware Multi-Expert Collaboration), a framework that combines hierarchical medical adaptation with complexity-aware expert routing for reliable Chinese medical QA. We adopt a three-stage LoRA-based supervised fine-tuning pipeline for domain adaptation, instruction following, and clinical reasoning. At inference, CAMEC routes each query by predicted complexity and selectively recruits three experts: an internal chain-of-thought (CoT) expert, a retrieval-augmented expert over a dense medical vector database, and a knowledge graph (KG) expert over a structured medical knowledge base. An LLM-as-a-Judge module evaluates and critiques expert reports, iteratively refining them into a consensus answer. Experiments on four Chinese medical benchmarks show that CAMEC consistentlyoutperforms strong general and medical LLM baselines, achieving 78.86% (CMExam), 84.15% (MedQA-CN), 78.51% (CMMLU-Med), and 74.40% (CMB-exam), with consistent absolute improvements over the previous state-of-the-artHuatuoGPT-o1-7B across all benchmarks. The complexity-aware router reduces expert invocations and inference cost, making CAMEC both highly effective and computationally efficient.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1781
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
38427–38457
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1781/
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Cite (ACL):
Yukang Wu, Xiyuan Jia, Jiayi Wu, HongChen Yu, Yuhan Qiu, and Wu Guohua. 2026. CAMEC: Complexity-Aware Multi-Expert Collaboration for Reliable Chinese Medical Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 38427–38457, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CAMEC: Complexity-Aware Multi-Expert Collaboration for Reliable Chinese Medical Question Answering (Wu et al., ACL 2026)
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