arXiv Computation and Language

Exploring Post-Training Alignment of Small Language Models for Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation: A Case Study of Medication Leaflet

The study investigates how post‑training alignment techniques affect small language models (SLMs) for generating medication leaflets from structured biomedical data. Four alignment methods—supervised fine‑tuning (SFT), direct preference optimization (DPO), odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), and group relative policy optimization (GRPO)—are evaluated using Qwen‑2.5 models, with a new FDALeaflets dataset derived from OpenFDA drug labels for zero‑shot cross‑regulatory testing. Results show that aligned SLMs can outperform GPT‑5 on reference‑based metrics, while ORPO and GRPO achieve the highest semantic textual similarity scores in‑domain and on FDALeaflets, respectively, highlighting the importance of alignment for semantic fidelity and generalization.

arXiv AI
Oct 7

Aligning LLMs with Biomedical Knowledge using Balanced Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2511.21075v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Engineering LLMs to accelerate life sciences research requires a robust alignment with biomedical knowledge. We observe that biomedical text...

By Zhenchao Tang, Fang Wang, Haohuai He, Jiale Zhou, Tianxu Lv, Jun Zhu, Shouzhi Chen, Minghao Yang, Yu Wang, Jiayang Wu, Yidong Song, Yaokun Li, Jiehui Huang, Jun Zhou, Bing He, Jianhua Yao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2606. 18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation.

By Yanjun Shao, Yundi Chen, Yashvi Patel, Aurelien Pelissier, Mar\'ia Rodr\'iguez Mart\'inez
arXiv AI
Jun 12

Analyzing and Improving Fine-grained Preference Optimization in Medical LVLMs

arXiv:2606. 12590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance across medical imaging tasks, yet they remain prone to factual inconsistencies, poor visual grounding, and misalignment with clinically meaningful feedback.

By Shayan Mohammadizadehsamakosh, Pritam Sarkar, Leonid Sigal, Ali Etemad, Elham Dolatabadi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Language Specificity vs. Domain Diversity: Benchmarking Transformers for Bangla Medical NER

This study benchmarks transformer models for Bangla medical named entity recognition (NER), comparing BanglaBERT, multilingual BERT (mBERT), XLM‑RoBERTa, and GPT‑4o mini under zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Across a full test set of 3,179 samples, fine‑tuned XLM‑RoBERTa achieves a new state‑of‑the‑art F1‑score of 0.5959, while BanglaBERT lags with 0.4937, suggesting that domain diversity outweighs language specificity. The analysis shows high performance on Medicine and Specialist entities (F1 > 0.83) but lower accuracy on Symptoms (F1 0.4367), and demonstrates that fine‑tuned transformers outperform prompt‑only approaches by a factor of 3.76.

By Rakib Abdullah, Md. Maruful Islam Maruf
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

OncoReason: Structuring Clinical Reasoning in LLMs for Robust and Interpretable Survival Prediction

arXiv:2510. 17532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting cancer treatment outcomes requires models that are both accurate and interpretable, particularly in the presence of heterogeneous clinical data.

By Raghu Vamshi Hemadri, Geetha Krishna Guruju, Kristi Topollai, Anna Ewa Choromanska
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

CliQ-RRG: Clinical-Knowledge Guided Disease-aware Visual-Textual Alignment for QA-Style Radiology Report Generation

CliQ‑RRG is a two‑stage framework for generating radiology reports that aligns visual and textual data using disease‑aware embeddings and prior‑guided attention to capture multi‑view dependencies. The second stage retrieves graph‑grounded clinical evidence and employs a large language model to produce concise, interpretable question‑answer style reports with diagnostic summaries. Experiments on two chest X‑ray benchmarks show that CliQ‑RRG outperforms previous methods on both lexical and clinical metrics, producing accurate and clinically coherent reports.

By Chandravardhan Singh Raghaw, Shahid Shafi Dar, Arnav Nishith Sharma, Shrey Modi, Nagendra Kumar
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Neurosymbolic Alignment for Physiologically-Safe Clinical Language Models

Neurosymbolic Alignment couples a 7B clinical language model with a graph‑based physiological world model to score candidate responses using homeostatic constraints, multi‑hop plausibility, and drug‑interaction penalties. This training‑time framework drives iterative on‑policy updates and achieves a 90.8% Clinical Safety Score on the CSB benchmark, outperforming ORPO, GPT‑4 (5‑shot), and a self‑correction pipeline. Ablation studies show that the HGNN scoring and iterative training are the key contributors to the safety gains.

By Abdulhady Abas Abdullah, Erik Cambria, Milena Zivkovic
arXiv AI
Jul 20

RLearner-LLM: Balancing Logical Grounding and Fluency in Large Language Models via Hybrid Direct Preference Optimization

arXiv:2605. 04539v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), the efficient alternative to PPO-based RLHF, falls short on knowledge-intensive generation: standard preference signals from human annotators or LLM judges exhibit a systematic verbosity bias that rewards fluency over logical correctness.

By Qiming Bao, Juho Leinonen, Paul Denny, Michael J. Witbrock
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Aligning Biomedical Texts and Knowledge Graphs: A Systematic Comparison of Lightweight Alignment Strategies

The paper introduces a unified framework for aligning biomedical text with knowledge graphs using a lightweight projection learned via contrastive learning, keeping the text encoder and KG embedding model frozen. It evaluates six design choices—text encoder, KG embedding, projection head, triple composition, training direction, and hard‑negative sampling—on a newly created CTD‑Align corpus of 22K chemical‑gene interaction pairs linked to PubMed passages. The study finds that triple composition and training direction have the largest impact, while simpler linear projections over concatenated subject, predicate, and object embeddings yield the best performance.

By Artem Bisliouk, Elizaveta Nosova, Heiko Paulheim, Andreea Iana, Rita T. Sousa
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 9

CliQ-RRG: Clinical-Knowledge Guided Disease-aware Visual-Textual Alignment for QA-Style Radiology Report Generation

CliQ‑RRG is a two‑stage framework for generating radiology reports that aligns visual and textual data using disease‑aware embeddings and a Prior‑Guided Attention Module to capture multi‑view dependencies. In the second stage, GraphRAG‑guided retrieval adds graph‑grounded clinical evidence, and a large language model restructures the content into concise question‑answer pairs with diagnostic summaries. Experiments on two chest X‑ray benchmarks show that CliQ‑RRG outperforms previous methods in both lexical and clinical metrics, producing accurate and clinically coherent QA‑style reports.