Severity-Aware Curriculum Learning with Multi-Model Response Selection for Medical Text Generation

Telehealth systems have become increasingly important for delivering accessible and timely medical information. Existing large language models often struggle to provide consistent and contextually appropriate medical responses across varying levels of case severity. This limitation highlights the need for models that can effectively adapt to the progressive complexity in medical queries. To address this challenge, we introduce a severity-aware multi-model framework that integrates curriculum training strategy with relevance-based response selection. The proposed framework employs a three-stage curriculum learning strategy, where each model is trained sequentially on mild, moderate, and critical cases to progressively acquire domain knowledge. The approach utilizes five large language models, each independently trained under the same curriculum scheme. During inference, all models generate candidate responses, and the most appropriate response is selected as the final output. The framework is trained and evaluated on the MAQA dataset, which provides annotated medical question-answer pairs. Experimental results evaluated using BERTScore demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to both baseline and fine-tuned models, attaining 86.71% in the baseline setting and 90.30% after fine-tuning. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining curriculum learning with multi-model response selection in improving response quality and relevance in medical text generation.

A Severity-Based Curriculum Learning Strategy for Arabic Medical Text Generation

Arabic medical text generation is increasingly needed to help users interpret symptoms and access general health guidance in their native language. Nevertheless, many existing methods assume uniform importance across training samples, overlooking differences in clinical severity. This simplification can hinder the model's ability to properly capture complex or high-risk cases. To overcome this issue, this work introduces a Severity-based Curriculum Learning Strategy for Arabic Medical Text Generation, where the training process is structured to move gradually from less severe to more critical medical conditions. The approach divides the dataset into ordered stages based on severity and incrementally exposes the model to more challenging cases during fine-tuning, allowing it to first learn basic medical patterns before addressing more complex scenarios. The proposed method is evaluated on a subset of the Medical Arabic Question Answering (MAQA) dataset, which includes Arabic medical questions describing symptoms alongside corresponding responses. In addition, the dataset is annotated with three severity levels (Mild, Moderate, and Critical) using a rule-based method developed in this study. The results demonstrate that incorporating severity-aware curriculum learning leads to consistent performance improvements across all tested models, with gains of around +4% to +7% over baseline models and +3% to +6% compared with conventional fine-tuning approaches.

Severity-Aware Weighted Loss for Arabic Medical Text Generation

Large language models have shown strong potential for Arabic medical text generation; however, traditional fine-tuning objectives treat all medical cases uniformly, ignoring differences in clinical severity. This limitation is particularly critical in healthcare settings, where errors in severe cases contain higher clinical risk. In this work, we propose a severity-aware weighted loss for fine-tuning Arabic language models on medical complaint-response data. The method depends on soft severity probabilities to dynamically scale token-level loss contributions during optimization, thereby prioritizing clinically critical interactions without modifying model architectures. Experiments are conducted using the MAQA dataset, which provides Arabic medical complaints and trusted human responses. Severity labels and probabilistic scores are automatically derived using a fine-tuned AraBERT-based classifier and incorporated exclusively at the loss level. The proposed approach is evaluated across ten Arabic large language models of varying architectures and parameter scales. While standard cross-entropy fine-tuning yields only modest improvements, severity-aware optimization consistently achieves larger gains. Using a balanced weighting configuration, performance improves from 54.04% to 66.14% for AraGPT2-Base, from 59.16% to 67.18% for AraGPT2-Medium, and from 57.83% to 66.86% for Qwen2.5-0.5B, with peak performance reaching 67.18%. Overall, severity-aware fine-tuning delivers improvements of up to 12.10% over non-fine-tuned baselines, demonstrating robust and architecture-consistent gains.