DDO: Dual-Decision Optimization via Multi-Agent Collaboration for LLM-Based Medical Consultation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong generalization and reasoning abilities, making them well-suited for complex decision-making tasks such as medical consultation (MC). However, existing LLM-based methods often fail to capture the dual nature of MC, which entails two distinct sub-tasks: symptom inquiry, a sequential decision-making process, and disease diagnosis, a classification problem. This mismatch often results in ineffective symptom inquiry and unreliable disease diagnosis. To address this, we propose \textbf{DDO}, a novel LLM-based framework that performs \textbf{D}ual-\textbf{D}ecision \textbf{O}ptimization by decoupling and independently optimizing the the two sub-tasks through a collaborative multi-agent workflow. Experiments on three real-world MC datasets show that DDO consistently outperforms existing LLM-based approaches and achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art generation-based methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in the MC task.

@article{jia2025_2505.18630,
  title={ DDO: Dual-Decision Optimization via Multi-Agent Collaboration for LLM-Based Medical Consultation },
  author={ Zhihao Jia and Mingyi Jia and Junwen Duan and Jianxin Wang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.18630},
  year={ 2025 }
}