HongChen Yu
2026
CAMEC: Complexity-Aware Multi-Expert Collaboration for Reliable Chinese Medical Question Answering
Yukang Wu | Xiyuan Jia | Jiayi Wu | HongChen Yu | Yuhan Qiu | Wu Guohua
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yukang Wu | Xiyuan Jia | Jiayi Wu | HongChen Yu | Yuhan Qiu | Wu Guohua
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
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.