TL;DR — read this first (integrity over hype)
This is a research artifact, not a leaderboard-beating model. On a held-out
LLM-judged win-rate (Gemini 3.1 pro, 200 samples) the base model wins, 58/42.
We report that plainly. The contribution of this project is the dataset (+30%
quality, Grade B→A — see the
dataset card)
and the rigorous finding documented below.
📓 The AutoScientist's notebook
Hypothesis. Adapting a high-quality medical chain-of-thought dataset (+30% platform
quality) and SFT-ing a small model on it should beat the base model on held-out medical
reasoning.
Experiment 1 — 20k rows, LoRA r=64, 3 epochs.
→ Base 58 / adapted 42. Medical category: base 55 / adapted 46.
→ Diagnostic: eval-loss plateaued after ~epoch 1 (1.559→1.525) while train-loss kept
falling (2.27→1.19) — overfitting.
Experiment 2 — controlled follow-up: 60k rows, +40% general-purpose data
(to counter catastrophic forgetting, per platform guidance), tuned recipe, more steps.
→ Base 62 / adapted 38. It got worse — higher peak LR + more steps moved the
model further from a strong base.
Conclusion (reproducible across two runs).
Supervised fine-tuning an already-instruction-tuned 0.8B model on long (~780-word)
chain-of-thought makes it more verbose, and the judge prefers the base's crisper
answers. Dataset quality and small-model win-rate are different axes. No
hyperparameter or data-mix change flipped it — the effect is structural, not a bug.
This is the result the challenge is designed to surface: a clean, honest, reproducible
negative — the dataset is the win; the model is the documented experiment.
Model description
- Base model:
Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B — the exact model AutoScientist trained from
(served via togethercomputer/Qwen3.5-0.8B). All numbers are relative to this base,
identical prompts and settings.
- Method: AutoScientist, LoRA SFT,
train_on_inputs=false.
- Released recipe (Experiment 1, the stronger of the two): r=64, α=128, dropout 0.05,
target
q,k,v,o_proj, 3 epochs, LR ~1.1e-4 (cosine, warmup 0.05), weight-decay 0.01,
grad-clip 2. Final train-loss ≈ 1.19, eval-loss ≈ 1.53 (168 steps).
- Weight format: LoRA adapter (
adapter_model.safetensors + adapter_config.json),
base repointed to Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B for portable PEFT loading.
- Language: English. Size: ~0.8B base params.
📊 Evaluation (base vs. adapted) — honest
Judge = Gemini 3.1 pro, 200 held-out samples, identical prompts/settings.
Table with columns: Win-rate (head-to-head), Base Qwen3.5-0.8B, Adapted (this model)| Win-rate (head-to-head) | Base Qwen3.5-0.8B | Adapted (this model) |
|---|
| On the dataset task | 58 | 42 |
| Medical category (all tasks) | 55 | 46 |
Dataset quality (Adaptive Data, platform-measured): +30% overall, Grade B→A,
completion quality +37.9%, message quality +17.6%, percentile 15.3→33.0.
🩺 What it's designed to do (safety blueprint)
Trained to reason then answer, stay grounded in evidence, hedge, recommend clinician
confirmation, escalate red-flag/emergency symptoms, refuse when uncertain, and preserve
numeric values exactly. (Design goals of the dataset; not a claim of clinical accuracy.)
How to use
from peft import PeftModel
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
base = "Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(base)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(base)
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(model, "hetanshwaghela/autoscientist-healthcare-reasoning")
⚠️ Limitations & safety
- Underperforms its base on the held-out judge — do not treat as an improvement over
Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B. Tends to be verbose.
- Educational decision-support, not a medical device. Not for individual diagnosis,
treatment, or dosing without a qualified clinician. Escalate emergencies; preserve
numeric values exactly.
- Inherits base-model and machine-generated-data limitations; English, exam-style skew.
🔁 Reproducibility
Credit
Built with Adaptive Data by Adaption. Base: Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B. Foundation data:
FreedomIntelligence/medical-o1-reasoning-SFT (Apache-2.0). Public-health blend: CDC
public-domain text (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; no CDC
endorsement is implied).