One Panel Does Not Fit All: Case-Adaptive Multi-Agent Deliberation for Clinical Prediction

Yuxing Lu, Yushuhong Lin, Jason Zhang


Abstract
Large language models applied to clinical prediction exhibit case-level heterogeneity: simple cases yield consistent outputs, while complex cases produce divergent predictions under minor prompt changes. Existing single-agent strategies sample from one role-conditioned distribution, and multi-agent frameworks use fixed roles with flat majority voting, discarding the diagnostic signal in disagreement. We propose CAMP (Case-Adaptive Multi-agent Panel), where an attending-physician agent dynamically assembles a specialist panel tailored to each case’s diagnostic uncertainty. Each specialist evaluates candidates via three-valued voting (KEEP/REFUSE/NEUTRAL), enabling principled abstention outside one’s expertise. A hybrid router directs each diagnosis through strong consensus, fallback to the attending physician’s judgment, or evidence-based arbitration that weighs argument quality over vote counts. On diagnostic prediction and brief hospital course generation from MIMIC-IV across four LLM backbones, CAMP consistently outperforms strong baselines while consuming fewer tokens than most competing multi-agent methods, with voting records and arbitration traces offering transparent decision audits.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-srw.75
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Santosh T.Y.S.S., Juan Diego Rodriguez, Ona de Gibert
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
844–860
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-srw.75/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuxing Lu, Yushuhong Lin, and Jason Zhang. 2026. One Panel Does Not Fit All: Case-Adaptive Multi-Agent Deliberation for Clinical Prediction. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 844–860, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
One Panel Does Not Fit All: Case-Adaptive Multi-Agent Deliberation for Clinical Prediction (Lu et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-form-platform/2026.acl-srw.75.pdf