R2MED: A Benchmark for Reasoning-Driven Medical Retrieval

Understand

Current medical retrieval benchmarks primarily emphasize lexical or shallow semantic similarity, overlooking the reasoning-intensive demands that are central to clinical decision-making.

• In practice, physicians often retrieve authoritative medical evidence to support diagnostic hypotheses.
• Such evidence typically aligns with an inferred diagnosis rather than the surface form of a patient's symptoms, leading to low lexical or semantic overlap between queries and relevant documents.
• To address this gap, we introduce R2MED, the first benchmark explicitly designed for reasoning-driven medical retrieval.