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arXiv AI By Sanjay Basu

Inhibitory Attention for Clinical Long-Context Reasoning: Characterizing and Mitigating Lost-in-the-Middle Effects in EHR Processing

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The paper identifies a new problem in clinical natural language processing called the clinical lost‑in‑the‑middle (CLitM) effect, where large language models perform poorly on information located near the center of long electronic health record (EHR) documents. Using the MedAlign dataset, the authors quantify a 21.9‑percentage‑point accuracy gap across 2,196 instruction‑response pairs and six models, showing that most critical facts lie in the CLitM trough. They propose Query‑Conditioned Clinical Suppression (QCCS), a lightweight context‑selection gate that outperforms traditional retrieval methods (BM25, dense retrieval, cross‑encoder reranking) on a held‑out set of 83 instructions, achieving up to 25.3% accuracy for middle‑position queries. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that standard retrieval strategies fail to reliably surface central clinical information, and that a query‑aligned selection mechanism can substantially improve model performance on critical EHR data."

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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