HerHealthEval is a controlled evaluation framework that tests multilingual understanding of women's-health communication across English, French, and Modern Standard Arabic. It provides six communicative forms—canonical, clinical, layperson, indirect or hedged, emotionally concerned, and deliberately under-specified—each conveying the same clinical concern except the under-specified form omits details to assess clarification needs. The study evaluates multilingual instruction models and QLoRA-adapted variants on tasks such as concern classification, risk calibration, clarification behavior, parse compliance, and cross-form consistency, revealing that high aggregate accuracy can mask safety-relevant failures and that language-invariant risk labels improve performance.
arXiv:2607. 12336v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, while serving as a foundational enabler for modern social media and digital health services, exert a bivalent effect by simultaneously acting as a combatant against and a spread vector for misinformation.
MIRA is a bilingual benchmark that evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) provide consistent medical information across different user phrasings, languages, and health literacy levels. It contains 4,320 prompts derived from 60 medically reviewed low‑risk health questions and reveals that models tend to omit key information and offer fewer concrete next steps when responding to low health‑literacy signals, a phenomenon termed Differential Information Dilution (DID). A knowledge‑guided mitigation prompt can reduce this dilution for most models, notably improving Claude and Qwen.
The paper examines how multilingual medical adaptation affects the internal representations of Whisper ASR models. By comparing various fine‑tuning strategies—zero‑shot decoding, English‑only, German‑only, two‑stage EN→EN+DE, and direct EN+DE fine‑tuning—it shows that fine‑tuning significantly improves performance, with the best model varying by setting. Layer‑wise encoder analysis reveals that English medical fine‑tuning drives the main representation shift, while multilingual continuation largely preserves the adapted space, and that domain and language signals remain recoverable across layers.
arXiv:2606. 28843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning a large language model is a ubiquitous method for enhancing its capability on a specific downstream task.
The study evaluates counterfactual bias in ten open‑source large language models (LLMs) for pediatric Emergency Severity Index (ESI) prediction. By creating paired clinical vignettes that differ only in demographic or socioeconomic variables, the authors measure shifts in acuity assignment, finding that counterfactual sensitivity varies widely across model families and sizes. A fine‑tuned Qwen2.5‑7B model exhibited the lowest sensitivity, while larger or medical‑domain models sometimes showed greater shifts, highlighting the need for fairness assessment before clinical deployment.
The paper examines how multilingual medical adaptation affects the internal representations of Whisper ASR models by performing layer‑wise encoder analysis. It compares several adaptation strategies—zero‑shot decoding, English‑only fine‑tuning, German‑only diagnostic fine‑tuning, two‑stage EN→EN+DE continuation, and direct EN+DE fine‑tuning—across different Whisper sizes, finding that fine‑tuning improves performance but the best model varies by setting. Layer‑wise results show that English medical fine‑tuning drives the main encoder shift, while multilingual continuation largely preserves the adapted representation space, with domain and language information remaining recoverable across layers. "whyItMatters":"The study provides insight into how multilingual medical adaptation reshapes Whisper’s internal representations, guiding the selection of model sizes and fine‑tuning strategies for improved MedASR performance."
The paper introduces a framework to evaluate and diagnose the robustness of low‑resource multilingual text‑to‑speech systems when faced with complex text inputs such as numbers, dates, named entities, long sentences, code‑switched expressions, and punctuation structures. It assesses robustness across content consistency, language consistency, and generation stability, and proposes automatic metrics (character error rate, language ID accuracy, duration abnormal rate) along with a lightweight Text Risk Score (TRS) that predicts synthesis risk from interpretable text features. Experiments on Thai, Vietnamese, Swahili, and Indonesian TTS systems reveal distinct failure patterns and show that TRS correlates positively with content and duration errors, offering a low‑cost pre‑synthesis risk indicator.
The study investigates how UK healthcare staff use Google Translate to communicate with patients who speak French or Spanish, focusing on the risks of translating medical abbreviations. Twenty-one staff members from various specialties were interviewed after reviewing translated clinical examples, and the data were analyzed qualitatively to assess awareness of potential safety hazards. The research highlights a gap in understanding how reliance on machine translation might compromise patient care, especially when dealing with abbreviated medical terminology.
The paper introduces Labadain-MedQA, a Tetun medical question‑answering dataset created by translating MedAlpaca’s Medical Flashcards and WikiDoc Patient Information into Tetun with Gemini 2.5 Flash, yielding 39,077 QA pairs. Translation quality was evaluated on 50 random pairs, showing human translations scored higher than LLM‑generated ones for medical accuracy and fluency (4.43/5 vs. 4.02/5, p < 0.001). Fine‑tuning Gemma and Llama models with parameter‑efficient methods on this dataset improved performance on Tetun‑translated USMLE multiple‑choice questions by up to 10.79% relative accuracy.
arXiv:2604.26766v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate and consistent Emergency Severity Index (ESI) assignment remains a persistent challenge in emergency departments, where highly varia...
arXiv:2611.07940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background: Cardiovascular care generates large volumes of clinical free-text documentation in local languages. However, clinical natural language pr...
arXiv:2608. 14626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in safety alignment, yet their safety guarantees remain significantly weaker in low-resource and multilingual settings than in high-resource languages.