# RePrompT: Recurrent Prompt Tuning for Integrating Structured EHR Encoders with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17725 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17725/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05961/) (2024)
- [RETAIN: An Interpretable Predictive Model for Healthcare using Reverse Time Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05745/) (2016)
- [SPoT: Better Frozen Model Adaptation through Soft Prompt Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07904/) (2021)
- [GRAM: Graph-based Attention Model for Healthcare Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07012/) (2016)
- [Learning the Graphical Structure of Electronic Health Records with Graph Convolutional Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04716/) (2019)
- [Fine-Tuned 'Small' LLMs (Still) Significantly Outperform Zero-Shot Generative AI Models in Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08660/) (2024)
- [Deepr: A Convolutional Net for Medical Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07519/) (2016)
- [GraphCare: Enhancing Healthcare Predictions with Personalized Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12788/) (2023)
- [SafeDrug: Dual Molecular Graph Encoders for Recommending Effective and Safe Drug Combinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02711/) (2021)
- [AdaCare: Explainable Clinical Health Status Representation Learning via Scale-Adaptive Feature Extraction and Recalibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12205/) (2019)
- [StageNet: Stage-Aware Neural Networks for Health Risk Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10054/) (2020)
- [Capabilities of GPT-5 on Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08224/) (2025)
- [Prompt engineering paradigms for medical applications: scoping review and recommendations for better practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01249/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Learning on Medical Intents for Sequential Prescription Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10259/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RASPER: Reward-Aligned Summarization of Clinical Notes for EHR Outcome Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02979/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong promise for mining Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by reasoning over longitudinal clinical information to capture context-rich patient trajectories. However, leveraging LLMs for structured EHRs (e.g., standardized diagnosis and medication codes) presents two key challenges. First, translating time-stamped EHR sequences into plain text can obscure both temporal structure and code identities, weakening the ability to capture code co-occurrence and longitudinal regularities. Second, unlike cohort-trained predictive models that learn a shared, task-aligned representation space across patients, LLMs are often applied in a case-isolated inference setting where each patient is processed independently without leveraging population-level patterns. To address these challenges, we introduce RePrompT, a time-aware LLM framework that integrates structured EHR encoders through prompt tuning, without modifying underlying architectures. Specifically, RePrompT recurrently incorporates latent states from prior visits to preserve longitudinal information, and injects population-level information through trainable prompt tokens derived from a cohort-trained, task-aligned EHR encoder. Experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV demonstrate that RePrompT consistently outperforms both EHR-based and LLM-based baselines across multiple clinical prediction tasks.
