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ActiveMedAgent: Cost-Aware Trajectory Learning for Multimodal Medical Diagnosis

Weiwei Ma Xiaobing Yu Peijie Qiu Jin Yang Zhaoqi An Xuanzhao Dong Xiaoqi Zhao Xiaofeng Liu
Oct 2026
Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Natural Language Processing Computer Vision

Abstract

Clinical diagnosis is inherently sequential: clinicians escalate from cheap to costly tests only when additional evidence is expected to resolve diagnostic uncertainty. We present ActiveMedAgent, a framework that brings this cost-aware sequential logic to multimodal medical AI. Given a frozen, API-accessed vision-language model, ActiveMedAgent tracks probability distributions over candidate diagnoses and scores each acquisition by its per-step diagnostic utility minus cost. A lightweight MLP controller is then trained offline on these scored trajectories, learning when to request additional evidence and when to commit. Across three commonly used benchmarks, trajectory-based policy learning consistently outperforms both unguided acquisition and full-modality baselines. Notably, we identify an information overload effect. In 175 cases, the agent produces a correct diagnosis with fewer channels while the full-modality baseline fails, showing that learning what to omit can be as important as learning what to acquire.

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