mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ProMedical: Hierarchical Fine-Grained Criteria Modeling for Medical LLM Alignment via Explicit Injection

arXiv 2604.08326 ↗First posted 9 Apr 2026cs.AIcited by 2

On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Medical LLM alignment

Abstract (arXiv)

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with high-stakes medical standards remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the dissonance between coarse-grained preference signals and the complex, multi-dimensional nature of clinical protocols. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProMedical, a unified alignment framework grounded in fine-grained clinical criteria. We first construct ProMedical-Preference-50k, a dataset generated via a human-in-the-loop pipeline that augments medical instructions with rigorous, physician-derived rubrics. Leveraging this corpus, we propose the Explicit Criteria Injection paradigm to train a multi-dimensional reward model. Unlike traditional scalar reward models, our approach explicitly disentangles safety constraints from general proficiency, enabling precise guidance during reinforcement learning. To rigorously validate this framework, we establish ProMedical-Bench, a held-out evaluation suite anchored by double-blind expert adjudication. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that optimizing the Qwen3-8B base model via ProMedical-RM-guided GRPO yields substantial gains, improving overall accuracy by 22.3% and safety compliance by 21.7%, effectively rivaling proprietary frontier models. Furthermore, the aligned policy generalizes robustly to external benchmarks, demonstrating performance comparable to state-of-the-art models on UltraMedical. We publicly release our datasets, reward models, and benchmarks to facilitate reproducible research in safety-aware medical alignment.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical LLM alignment, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 35 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

Builds on

35 of 52 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025InfiMed-ORBIT: Aligning LLMs on Open-Ended Complex Tasks via Rubric-Based Incremental Training17 Oct
  2. 2023AlpaCare:Instruction-tuned Large Language Models for Medical Application23 Oct
  3. 2023HuatuoGPT, towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor24 May

Other references · 32

  1. 2019PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Librarycited by 20,160
  2. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  3. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  4. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
  5. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,767
  6. 2023FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioningcited by 2,551
  7. 2023G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignmentcited by 2,205
  8. 2019HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processingcited by 2,201
  9. 2022Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledgecited by 1,807
  10. 2020What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Examscited by 1,324
  11. 2019ZeRO: Memory Optimizations Toward Training Trillion Parameter Modelscited by 1,278
  12. 2019PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answeringcited by 1,271
20 more
  1. 2023Prometheus: Inducing Fine-grained Evaluation Capability in Language Modelscited by 558
  2. 2022BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Miningcited by 531
  3. 2025HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Healthcited by 385
  4. 2024SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuningcited by 345
  5. 2023ChatDoctor: A Medical Chat Model Fine-Tuned on a Large Language Model Meta-AI (LLaMA) Using Medical Domain Knowledgecited by 324
  6. 2023MedAlpaca -- An Open-Source Collection of Medical Conversational AI Models and Training Datacited by 282
  7. 2024HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMscited by 257
  8. 2025Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoningcited by 217
  9. 2023A Survey of Large Language Models for Healthcare: from Data, Technology, and Applications to Accountability and Ethicscited by 162
  10. 2019A Question-Entailment Approach to Question Answeringcited by 133
  11. 2023Clinical Camel: An Open Expert-Level Medical Language Model with Dialogue-Based Knowledge Encodingcited by 71
  12. 2024UltraMedical: Building Specialized Generalists in Biomedicinecited by 67
  13. 2022Causal Confusion and Reward Misidentification in Preference-Based Reward Learningcited by 52
  14. 2024K-QA: A Real-World Medical Q&A Benchmarkcited by 30
  15. 2025Limitations of Large Language Models in Clinical Problem-Solving Arising from Inflexible Reasoningcited by 29
  16. 2023Differentiate ChatGPT-generated and Human-written Medical Textscited by 26
  17. 2024A Benchmark for Long-Form Medical Question Answeringcited by 25
  18. 2025MedBench v4: A Robust and Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Chinese Medical Language Models, Multimodal Models, and Intelligent Agentscited by 8
  19. 2024DAHL: Domain-specific Automated Hallucination Evaluation of Long-Form Text through a Benchmark Dataset in Biomedicinecited by 4
  20. 2025Ensuring Medical AI Safety: Interpretability-Driven Detection and Mitigation of Spurious Model Behavior and Associated Datacited by 2

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Quark Medical Alignment: A Holistic Multi-Dimensional Alignment and Collaborative Optimization Paradigm
  2. 2025Hierarchical Divide-and-Conquer for Fine-Grained Alignment in LLM-Based Medical Evaluation
  3. 2025Black-Box Behavioral Distillation Breaks Safety Alignment in Medical LLMs
  4. 2025Multidimensional Rubric-oriented Reward Model Learning via Geometric Projection Reference Constraints
  5. 2026ClinAlign: Scaling Healthcare Alignment from Clinician Preference
  6. 2024Aligning (Medical) LLMs for (Counterfactual) Fairness
  7. 2026LLMdoctor: Token-Level Flow-Guided Preference Optimization for Efficient Test-Time Alignment of Large Language Models
  8. 2026Neurosymbolic Alignment for Physiologically-Safe Clinical Language Models