{"id":1162332,"date":"2026-02-17T11:37:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T19:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1162332"},"modified":"2026-02-17T11:37:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T19:37:26","slug":"mmedagent-rl-optimizing-multi-agent-collaboration-for-multimodal-medical-reasoning","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/mmedagent-rl-optimizing-multi-agent-collaboration-for-multimodal-medical-reasoning\/","title":{"rendered":"MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Medical Large Vision-Language Models (Med-LVLMs) have shown strong potential in multimodal diagnostic tasks. However, existing single-agent models struggle to generalize across diverse medical specialties, limiting their performance. Recent efforts introduce multi-agent collaboration frameworks inspired by clinical workflows, where general practitioners (GPs) and specialists interact in a fixed sequence. Despite improvements, these static pipelines lack flexibility and adaptability in reasoning. To address this, we propose MMedAgent-RL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based multi-agent framework that enables dynamic, optimized collaboration among medical agents. Specifically, we train two GP agents based on Qwen2.5-VL via RL: the triage doctor learns to assign patients to appropriate specialties, while the attending physician integrates the judgments from multi-specialists and its own knowledge to make final decisions. To address the inconsistency in specialist outputs, we introduce a curriculum learning (CL)-guided RL strategy with dynamic entropy regulation, progressively teaching the attending physician to balance between imitating specialists and correcting their mistakes. Experiments on five medical VQA benchmarks demonstrate that MMedAgent-RL outperforms both open-source and proprietary Med-LVLMs. Notably, it achieves an average performance gain of 23.6% over strong baselines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Medical Large Vision-Language Models (Med-LVLMs) have shown strong potential in multimodal diagnostic tasks. However, existing single-agent models struggle to generalize across diverse medical specialties, limiting their performance. Recent efforts introduce multi-agent collaboration frameworks inspired by clinical workflows, where general practitioners (GPs) and specialists interact in a fixed sequence. Despite improvements, these static pipelines lack flexibility [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"ICLR 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