Beyond Endpoint Gains: A Weight-Delta Audit of Medical Specialization

The paper critiques the common practice of evaluating specialist language models solely by endpoint gains, arguing that the underlying model updates are largely unexamined. It introduces a paired weight‑delta path audit and applies it to two public generalist‑to‑medical‑specialist checkpoint pairs, showing that the decoder‑side updates largely reconstruct the observed benchmark improvements. However, the audit finds that the improvements are not neatly localized to a single component family, indicating that component‑level explanations are more complex than previously assumed.

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• llms
• benchmarks