Audit Before You Distill: A Controlled Workflow for Reasoning Transfer into Compact Medical Language Models
Teacher rationales can help a smaller model answer health professions questions, but they can also reinforce errors. We examined when they help and how this evidence can guide training using Brazilian Portuguese questions from medical and multiprofessional residency examinations. First, we measured how a teacher rationale changed the student's probability of selecting the correct answer and compared this effect with rationales drawn from other questions. The complete rationale increased this probability by 21~p.p. when the teacher was correct and decreased it by 14~p.p. when the teacher was wrong. By intervening on the reasoning content, we showed that shuffled rationales did not produce ...
| Authors | Tiago Martinelli, João Paulo Papa, Adriano José Pereira |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
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