Abstract
Large language models are increasingly used in oncology applications, but their predictions are often weakly grounded in explicit medical structure. We present TRACE, a deployable tree-relational enhancement framework for oncology LLMs. TRACE separates expensive offline structure learning from lightweight online inference: oncology concepts and relations are organized into an updatable tree-relational structure, refined using LM-loss-derived evidence, and retrieved at inference time as compact prompt evidence. This design supports task-adaptive evidence selection without requiring supervised labels in the zero-shot setting. Across ten oncology classification tasks and one MedQuAD CancerGov QA benchmark, TRACE improves both label-free evaluation and supervised fine-tuning. Additional analyses show that TRACE improves over vanilla RAG and generic GraphRAG, remains useful under leakage-controlled METABRIC inputs, and produces interpretable evidence paths aligned with clinical reasoning. These results suggest that explicit, updatable medical structure is a practical path toward more accurate and auditable oncology LLM deployment.
Keywords
Publication details
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Lai, J., Li, Y., Qin, Y., & Qian, H. (2026). TRACE: Deployable Tree-Relational Structure Enhancement for Oncology LLMs. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-deployable-tree-relational-structure-enhancement-for-oncology-llms
MLA 9
Lai, Jizheng, et al. "TRACE: Deployable Tree-Relational Structure Enhancement for Oncology LLMs." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-deployable-tree-relational-structure-enhancement-for-oncology-llms.
Chicago (author–date)
Lai, Jizheng, Yingyun Li, Ying Qin, and Haiyang Qian. 2026. "TRACE: Deployable Tree-Relational Structure Enhancement for Oncology LLMs." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-deployable-tree-relational-structure-enhancement-for-oncology-llms.
Harvard
Lai, J., Li, Y., Qin, Y. and Qian, H. (2026) 'TRACE: Deployable Tree-Relational Structure Enhancement for Oncology LLMs', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-deployable-tree-relational-structure-enhancement-for-oncology-llms.
Vancouver
Lai J, Li Y, Qin Y, Qian H. TRACE: Deployable Tree-Relational Structure Enhancement for Oncology LLMs. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-deployable-tree-relational-structure-enhancement-for-oncology-llms
IEEE
J. Lai, Y. Li, Y. Qin, and H. Qian, "TRACE: Deployable Tree-Relational Structure Enhancement for Oncology LLMs," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/trace-deployable-tree-relational-structure-enhancement-for-oncology-llms.