HypEHR: Hyperbolic Modeling of Electronic Health Records for Efficient Question Answering

Yuyu Liu, Sarang Rajendra Patil, Mengjia Xu, Tengfei Ma


Abstract
Electronic health record (EHR) question answering is often handled by LLM-based pipelines that are costly to deploy and do not explicitly leverage the hierarchical structure of clinical data. Motivated by evidence that medical ontologies and patient trajectories exhibit hyperbolic geometry, we propose HypEHR, a compact Lorentzian model that embeds codes, visits, and questions in hyperbolic space and answers queries via geometry-consistent cross-attention with type-specific pointer heads. HypEHR is pretrained with next-visit diagnosis prediction and hierarchy-aware regularization to align representations with the ICD ontology. On two MIMIC-IV-based EHR-QA benchmarks, HypEHR approaches LLM-based methods while using far fewer parameters. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yuyuliu11037/HypEHR.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.527
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10849–10862
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.527/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuyu Liu, Sarang Rajendra Patil, Mengjia Xu, and Tengfei Ma. 2026. HypEHR: Hyperbolic Modeling of Electronic Health Records for Efficient Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 10849–10862, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HypEHR: Hyperbolic Modeling of Electronic Health Records for Efficient Question Answering (Liu et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.527.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.findings-acl.527.checklist.pdf