AMANDA: Agentic Medical Knowledge Augmentation for Data-Efficient Medical Visual Question Answering
Ziqing Wang, Chengsheng Mao, Xiaole Wen, Yuan Luo, Kaize Ding
Abstract
Medical Multimodal Large Language Models (Med-MLLMs) have shown great promise in medical visual question answering (Med-VQA). However, when deployed in low-resource settings where abundant labeled data are unavailable, existing Med-MLLMs commonly fail due to their medical reasoning capability bottlenecks: (i) the intrinsic reasoning bottleneck that ignores the details from the medical image; (ii) the extrinsic reasoning bottleneck that fails to incorporate specialized medical knowledge. To address those limitations, we propose AMANDA, a training-free agentic framework that performs medical knowledge augmentation via LLM agents. Specifically, our intrinsic medical knowledge augmentation focuses on coarse-to-fine question decomposition for comprehensive diagnosis, while extrinsic medical knowledge augmentation grounds the reasoning process via biomedical knowledge graph retrieval. Extensive experiments across eight Med-VQA benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements in both zero-shot and few-shot Med-VQA settings. The code is available at https://github.com/REAL-Lab-NU/AMANDA.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.findings-emnlp.1350
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Suzhou, China
- Editors:
- Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 24810–24832
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.1350/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.1350
- Cite (ACL):
- Ziqing Wang, Chengsheng Mao, Xiaole Wen, Yuan Luo, and Kaize Ding. 2025. AMANDA: Agentic Medical Knowledge Augmentation for Data-Efficient Medical Visual Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 24810–24832, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- AMANDA: Agentic Medical Knowledge Augmentation for Data-Efficient Medical Visual Question Answering (Wang et al., Findings 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.1350.pdf