Yale-DM-Lab at ArchEHR-QA 2026: Deterministic Grounding and Multi-Pass Evidence Alignment for EHR Question Answering

arXiv cs.CL / 4/9/2026

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Key Points

  • Yale-DM-Lab introduces its ArchEHR-QA 2026 system, targeting patient-authored questions about hospitalization records across four subtasks: question reformulation, evidence sentence identification, answer generation, and evidence-answer alignment.
  • ST1 reformulates patient questions into clinician-interpreted questions using a dual-model pipeline with Claude Sonnet 4 and GPT-4o, while ST2–ST4 use Azure-hosted model ensembles (o3, GPT-5.2, GPT-5.1, DeepSeek-R1) with few-shot prompting and voting.
  • The team finds that model diversity plus ensemble voting improves results versus single-model baselines, and that providing the full clinician answer paragraph as extra prompt context helps evidence alignment.
  • On the development set, alignment accuracy is primarily constrained by reasoning ability, with best reported scores of 88.81 micro F1 for ST4, 65.72 macro F1 for ST2, and low-30s scores for ST3 and ST1.

Abstract

We describe the Yale-DM-Lab system for the ArchEHR-QA 2026 shared task. The task studies patient-authored questions about hospitalization records and contains four subtasks (ST): clinician-interpreted question reformulation, evidence sentence identification, answer generation, and evidence-answer alignment. ST1 uses a dual-model pipeline with Claude Sonnet 4 and GPT-4o to reformulate patient questions into clinician-interpreted questions. ST2-ST4 rely on Azure-hosted model ensembles (o3, GPT-5.2, GPT-5.1, and DeepSeek-R1) combined with few-shot prompting and voting strategies. Our experiments show three main findings. First, model diversity and ensemble voting consistently improve performance compared to single-model baselines. Second, the full clinician answer paragraph is provided as additional prompt context for evidence alignment. Third, results on the development set show that alignment accuracy is mainly limited by reasoning. The best scores on the development set reach 88.81 micro F1 on ST4, 65.72 macro F1 on ST2, 34.01 on ST3, and 33.05 on ST1.