[Submitted on 26 Aug 2026]
Title:Didactic knowledge or Clinical Cases? How Data Types Shape Medical Large Language Models
View a PDF of the paper titled Didactic knowledge or Clinical Cases? How Data Types Shape Medical Large Language Models, by Yuzheng Fan and 5 other authors
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Abstract:Medical large language models are commonly trained on mixtures of didactic data (e.g., textbooks) and clinical data (e.g., patient records), yet how these data types differentially shape model capabilities remains unclear. We address this issue with token-matched experiments that vary the didactic-to-clinical ratio and analyze how data composition affects performance, capability profiles, and error patterns across knowledge-intensive and clinic-oriented tasks. We uncover an asymmetric transfer across task types: clinical data improves clinic-oriented tasks while remaining competitive on knowledge-intensive ones, whereas didactic data mainly improves knowledge-intensive tasks. Error analysis suggests a knowing-doing gap, where improvements in knowledge recall do not reliably generalize to clinical reasoning. We further observe that modest amounts of clinical data yield most of the gains on EHR-grounded tasks, while the optimal mixture ratio varies with the knowledge and clinical reasoning demands of downstream tasks. These findings suggest that medical LLM data curation should be application-driven, with higher proportions of clinical data preferred for reasoning-intensive use cases.
Comments: This paper is accepted by NLPCC 2026 oral
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.22161 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.22161v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22161
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Yuzheng Fan [view email] [v1] Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:33:12 UTC (642 KB)
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