Towards Omni-RAG: Comprehensive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models in Medical Applications

Zhe Chen, Yusheng Liao, Shuyang Jiang, Pingjie Wang, YiQiu Guo, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang


Abstract
Large language models hold promise for addressing medical challenges, such as medical diagnosis reasoning, research knowledge acquisition, clinical decision-making, and consumer health inquiry support. However, they often generate hallucinations due to limited medical knowledge. Incorporating external knowledge is therefore critical, which necessitates multi-source knowledge acquisition. We address this challenge by framing it as a source planning problem, which is to formulate context-appropriate queries tailored to the attributes of diverse sources. Existing approaches either overlook source planning or fail to achieve it effectively due to misalignment between the model’s expectation of the sources and their actual content. To bridge this gap, we present MedOmniKB, a repository comprising multigenre and multi-structured medical knowledge sources. Leveraging these sources, we propose the Source Planning Optimisation method, which enhances multi-source utilisation. Our approach involves enabling an expert model to explore and evaluate potential plans while training a smaller model to learn source alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves multi-source planning performance, enabling the optimised small model to achieve state-of-the-art results in leveraging diverse medical knowledge sources.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.742
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15285–15309
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.742/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhe Chen, Yusheng Liao, Shuyang Jiang, Pingjie Wang, YiQiu Guo, Yanfeng Wang, and Yu Wang. 2025. Towards Omni-RAG: Comprehensive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models in Medical Applications. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15285–15309, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Omni-RAG: Comprehensive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models in Medical Applications (Chen et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.742.pdf