Multimodal Training to Unimodal Deployment: Leveraging Unstructured Data During Training to Optimize Structured Data Only Deployment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Zigui, Sun, Minghui, Shu, Jiang, Engelhard, Matthew M., Franz, Lauren, Goldstein, Benjamin A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866915885716865024
author Wang, Zigui
Sun, Minghui
Shu, Jiang
Engelhard, Matthew M.
Franz, Lauren
Goldstein, Benjamin A.
author_facet Wang, Zigui
Sun, Minghui
Shu, Jiang
Engelhard, Matthew M.
Franz, Lauren
Goldstein, Benjamin A.
contents Unstructured Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, such as clinical notes, contain clinical contextual observations that are not directly reflected in structured data fields. This additional information can substantially improve model learning. However, due to their unstructured nature, these data are often unavailable or impractical to use when deploying a model. We introduce a multimodal learning framework that leverages unstructured EHR data during training while producing a model that can be deployed using only structured EHR data. Using a cohort of 3,466 children evaluated for late talking, we generated note embeddings with BioClinicalBERT and encoded structured embeddings from demographics and medical codes. A note-based teacher model and a structured-only student model were jointly trained using contrastive learning and contrastive knowledge distillation loss, producing a strong classifier (AUROC = 0.985). Our proposed model reached an AUROC of 0.705, outperforming the structured-only baseline of 0.656. These results demonstrate that incorporating unstructured data during training enhances the model's capacity to identify task-relevant information within structured EHR data, enabling a deployable structured-only phenotype model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22530
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Training to Unimodal Deployment: Leveraging Unstructured Data During Training to Optimize Structured Data Only Deployment
Wang, Zigui
Sun, Minghui
Shu, Jiang
Engelhard, Matthew M.
Franz, Lauren
Goldstein, Benjamin A.
Machine Learning
Unstructured Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, such as clinical notes, contain clinical contextual observations that are not directly reflected in structured data fields. This additional information can substantially improve model learning. However, due to their unstructured nature, these data are often unavailable or impractical to use when deploying a model. We introduce a multimodal learning framework that leverages unstructured EHR data during training while producing a model that can be deployed using only structured EHR data. Using a cohort of 3,466 children evaluated for late talking, we generated note embeddings with BioClinicalBERT and encoded structured embeddings from demographics and medical codes. A note-based teacher model and a structured-only student model were jointly trained using contrastive learning and contrastive knowledge distillation loss, producing a strong classifier (AUROC = 0.985). Our proposed model reached an AUROC of 0.705, outperforming the structured-only baseline of 0.656. These results demonstrate that incorporating unstructured data during training enhances the model's capacity to identify task-relevant information within structured EHR data, enabling a deployable structured-only phenotype model.
title Multimodal Training to Unimodal Deployment: Leveraging Unstructured Data During Training to Optimize Structured Data Only Deployment
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22530