Preprint
A Domain Label Is Not a Treatment: Why Specialist and General-Purpose Language Models Trade Places Across Studies, What a 'Medical' Checkpoint Leaves Unspecified, and the Matched Contrasts That Would Assign the Gain
Life of Research A September 2026 study compares an 8B general-purpose instruction-tuned model with a medically fine-tuned checkpoint built on the same base and finds that the general model scores higher both at selecting the meaning of medical jargon and at recognising when a word is being used…