CARE: Privacy-Compliant Agentic Reasoning with Evidence Discordance

arXiv:2604.01113 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-04-01 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-04-01

Updated: 2026-08-30

Comments: Accepted as a Findings paper at EMNLP 2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly used to support high-stakes decision-making, but they typically perform worse when the available evidence is internally inconsistent.

Terminology

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly used to support high-stakes decision-making, but they typically perform worse when the available evidence is internally inconsistent. Such a scenario exists in real-world healthcare settings, with patient-reported symptoms contradicting medical signs. To study this problem, we introduce MIMIC-DOS, a dataset for short-horizon organ dysfunction worsening prediction in the intensive care unit (ICU) setting. We derive this dataset from the widely recognized MIMIC-IV, a publicly available electronic health record dataset, and construct it exclusively from cases in which discordance between signs and symptoms exists. This setting poses a substantial challenge for existing LLM-based approaches, with single-pass LLMs and agentic pipelines often struggling to reconcile such conflicting signals. To address this problem, we propose CARE: a multi-stage privacy-compliant agentic reasoning framework in which a proprietary LLM provides guidance by generating structured categories and transitions without accessing sensitive patient data, while a local LLM uses these categories and transitions to support evidence acquisition and final decision-making. Empirically, under controlled retrospective evaluation on MIMIC-DOS, CARE achieves the best overall performance across key metrics among the evaluated LLMs and agentic workflows, showing that it can more robustly handle conflicting clinical evidence while preserving privacy.

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