arXiv AI

Memorization in Large Language Models in Medicine: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Implications

arXiv:2509. 08604v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medicine, with many studies adapting them through continued pre-training or fine-tuning on medical data to enhance domain-specific accuracy and safety.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Memorisation bias in medical AI

arXiv:2609.17223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical AI models hold immense potential to improve patient outcomes, but they are also known to unintentionally memorise individual records from their...

By Moritz A. Knolle, Martin J. Menten, Laurin Lux, M\'elanie Roschewitz, Emma A. M. Stanley, Georgios Kaissis, Daniel Rueckert, Ben Glocker
arXiv AI
Jun 8

REMEDI: A Benchmark for Retention and Unlearning Evaluation in Multi-label Clinical Disease Inference

arXiv:2606. 07141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models trained for clinical disease inference are trained on patient data, which may include sensitive and private information, and data owners may request the removal of their data from a trained model due to privacy or copyright concerns.

By Anurag Sharma, Sai Teja Chunchu, Prasenjit Mitra, Sandipan Sikdar, Koustav Rudra
arXiv AI
Sep 17

From 'May' to 'Is': Certainty Distortion in Language Model Rewriting

The study examines how language models (LMs) alter the expressed certainty of statements when rewriting text, a process termed certainty distortion. Using an LM‑based metric aligned with human judgments, the authors find that up to 75% of LM outputs exhibit such distortion, with most models more likely to inflate certainty than reduce it. Repeated paraphrasing can amplify this effect, especially in medical contexts, and while prompt interventions help, they do not fully eliminate the bias.

By Catarina G Belem, Shang Wu, Hongyu Yao, Mark Steyvers, Sameer Singh, Padhraic Smyth
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Clinically Grounded Privacy Evaluation of Medical LMs

The paper introduces a clinically grounded privacy evaluation framework for medical language models, assessing leakage across a spectrum of adversarial access levels—from publicly inferable demographics to leaked note fragments. Using this framework on an LM pretrained on 378,000 clinical notes, the authors find that routine encounter metadata leads to high verbatim memorization and significant recovery of sensitive diagnoses (e.g., AUROC 0.91 for abortion, 0.82 for HIV). They also note that exact-match memorization can overstate disclosure, with 36% of memorized tokens being templated documentation, underscoring the risks of training on longitudinal clinical data and offering a reusable evaluation tool.

By Sasha Ronaghi, Sana Tonekaboni, Lena Stempfle, Vivian Utti, Jordan Li Cahoon, Nathaniel Hendrix, Ayin Vala, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Emily Alsentzer