TACL: Threshold-Adaptive Curriculum Learning Strategy for Enhancing Medical Text Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ren, Mucheng, Yan, Yucheng, Chen, He, Hu, Danqing, Xu, Jun, Zeng, Xian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ren, Mucheng
Yan, Yucheng
Chen, He
Hu, Danqing
Xu, Jun
Zeng, Xian
author_facet Ren, Mucheng
Yan, Yucheng
Chen, He
Hu, Danqing
Xu, Jun
Zeng, Xian
contents Medical texts, particularly electronic medical records (EMRs), are a cornerstone of modern healthcare, capturing critical information about patient care, diagnoses, and treatments. These texts hold immense potential for advancing clinical decision-making and healthcare analytics. However, their unstructured nature, domain-specific language, and variability across contexts make automated understanding an intricate challenge. Despite the advancements in natural language processing, existing methods often treat all data as equally challenging, ignoring the inherent differences in complexity across clinical records. This oversight limits the ability of models to effectively generalize and perform well on rare or complex cases. In this paper, we present TACL (Threshold-Adaptive Curriculum Learning), a novel framework designed to address these challenges by rethinking how models interact with medical texts during training. Inspired by the principle of progressive learning, TACL dynamically adjusts the training process based on the complexity of individual samples. By categorizing data into difficulty levels and prioritizing simpler cases early in training, the model builds a strong foundation before tackling more complex records. By applying TACL to multilingual medical data, including English and Chinese clinical records, we observe significant improvements across diverse clinical tasks, including automatic ICD coding, readmission prediction and TCM syndrome differentiation. TACL not only enhances the performance of automated systems but also demonstrates the potential to unify approaches across disparate medical domains, paving the way for more accurate, scalable, and globally applicable medical text understanding solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_15269
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TACL: Threshold-Adaptive Curriculum Learning Strategy for Enhancing Medical Text Understanding
Ren, Mucheng
Yan, Yucheng
Chen, He
Hu, Danqing
Xu, Jun
Zeng, Xian
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Medical texts, particularly electronic medical records (EMRs), are a cornerstone of modern healthcare, capturing critical information about patient care, diagnoses, and treatments. These texts hold immense potential for advancing clinical decision-making and healthcare analytics. However, their unstructured nature, domain-specific language, and variability across contexts make automated understanding an intricate challenge. Despite the advancements in natural language processing, existing methods often treat all data as equally challenging, ignoring the inherent differences in complexity across clinical records. This oversight limits the ability of models to effectively generalize and perform well on rare or complex cases. In this paper, we present TACL (Threshold-Adaptive Curriculum Learning), a novel framework designed to address these challenges by rethinking how models interact with medical texts during training. Inspired by the principle of progressive learning, TACL dynamically adjusts the training process based on the complexity of individual samples. By categorizing data into difficulty levels and prioritizing simpler cases early in training, the model builds a strong foundation before tackling more complex records. By applying TACL to multilingual medical data, including English and Chinese clinical records, we observe significant improvements across diverse clinical tasks, including automatic ICD coding, readmission prediction and TCM syndrome differentiation. TACL not only enhances the performance of automated systems but also demonstrates the potential to unify approaches across disparate medical domains, paving the way for more accurate, scalable, and globally applicable medical text understanding solutions.
title TACL: Threshold-Adaptive Curriculum Learning Strategy for Enhancing Medical Text Understanding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15269