ReflecTool: Towards Reflection-Aware Tool-Augmented Clinical Agents

Abstract: LLMs have shown promising potential in the medical domain, assisting with tasks like clinical note generation and patient communication. However, current LLMs are limited to text-based communication, hindering their ability to interact with diverse forms of information in clinical environments. Despite clinical agents succeeding in diverse signal interaction, they are oriented to a single clinical scenario and hence fail for broader applications. To evaluate clinical agents holistically, we propose ClinicalAgent Bench~(CAB), a comprehensive medical agent benchmark consisting of 18 tasks across five key realistic clinical dimensions. Building on this, we introduce ReflecTool, a novel framework that excels at utilizing domain-specific tools within two stages. The first optimization stage progressively enlarges a long-term memory by saving successful solving processes and tool-wise experience of agents in a tiny pre-defined training set. In the following inference stage, ReflecTool can search for supportive successful demonstrations from already built long-term memory to guide the tool selection strategy, and a verifier improves the tool usage according to the tool-wise experience with two verification methods--iterative refinement and candidate selection. Extensive experiments on ClinicalAgent Benchmark demonstrate that ReflecTool surpasses the pure LLMs with more than 10 points and the well-established agent-based methods with 3 points, highlighting its adaptability and effectiveness in solving complex clinical tasks.