ClinicalMC: A Benchmark for Multi-Course Clinical Decision-Making with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in healthcare, yet they still encounter significant challenges in complex clinical decision-making scenarios. Existing benchmarks primarily assess LLM performance in single-course settings and lack systematic evaluation in multi-course scenarios, where a patient's condition evolves over time. To address this gap, we propose ClinicalMC, a benchmark for multi-course clinical decision-making. It includes 1,275 Chinese and 5,804 English samples across four stages from admission to discharge. These stages cover triage, first-course examination/diagnosis/treatment, subsequent multi-course examination/assessment/treatment, and final diagnosis. In ClinicalMC, patients in the English dataset undergo an average of 5.11 clinical courses, whereas those in the Chinese dataset undergo 3.42. To assess LLM performance, we construct a multi-agent evaluation framework that includes patient, examiner, and doctor agents. Based on the benchmark and framework, we design two experimental settings -- a single-turn static setting and a multi-turn dynamic setting -- and assess three categories of LLMs: 1) closed-source LLMs like GPT5-mini; 2) open-source LLMs like DeepSeek-V3.2; and 3) medical LLMs like HuatuoGPT-o1. Through extensive evaluation, we aim to better understand LLM performance in the medical domain and support its effective deployment in healthcare.

Accelerating SGD for Distributed Deep-Learning Using Approximated Hessian Matrix

We introduce a novel method to compute a rank $m$ approximation of the inverse of the Hessian matrix in the distributed regime. By leveraging the differences in gradients and parameters of multiple Workers, we are able to efficiently implement a distributed approximation of the Newton-Raphson method. We also present preliminary results which underline advantages and challenges of second-order methods for large stochastic optimization problems. In particular, our work suggests that novel strategies for combining gradients provide further information on the loss surface.