Corpus Characterization and Inverse Constitutional Fine-Tuning for Style-Aware Radiology Reports

Abstract:Automated radiology report generation has advanced rapidly in diagnostic accuracy, yet generated reports frequently diverge from the stylistic conventions of authentic radiologist writing in structure, diction, and uncertainty language, a gap which has direct implications for clinician trust and user experience. To address this, we characterize stylistic variation across 2,000 reports from the CheXpert Plus dataset using Bio-ClinicalBERT embeddings, UMAP dimensionality reduction, and HDBSCAN clustering, identifying five distinct reporting patterns differing in pathology focus, narrative structure, and lexical preference. Drawing on these findings, we adapt the inverse constitutional AI framework to derive a style-focused constitution from radiologist-written report pairs without requiring a formal preference dataset. This constitution, encoding conventions of tone, diction, uncertainty calibration, and report structure, is incorporated into the supervised fine-tuning of a MedGemma-4B base model on 25,245 CheXpert Plus training pairs. Constitutional fine-tuning produces a substantial increases in text alignment (BLEU-4: 0.006 to 0.308; ROUGE-L: 0.171 to 0.484) relative to the untuned baseline. These gains show a qualitative shift in structural and lexical alignment rather than marginal improvement, as the baseline model produces near-zero scores due to format mismatch. Overall, we establish corpus-level style characterization and constitutional modeling as an effective and data-efficient strategy for producing radiology reports that conform to authentic radiologist writing conventions.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.14226 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.14226v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.14226 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.