Perturbation-Based Data Selection for Medical Question Answering

Abstract

Selecting a compact training subset is an important step in adapting medical language models from existing question-answering banks. We investigate perturbation-based data selection using two signals derived from Gaussian perturbations of the final-block representation: prediction-change frequency and non-flipping margin contraction. After a shared entropy prefilter, Representation-Sensitivity Prioritization (RSP) combines the signals using automatic root-mean-square scaling, while RSP-Drop ranks candidates by contraction alone. Both selectors use only questions and answer options during selection. We evaluate them with MedGemma-4B on five medical QA datasets at retained-set budgets of 64, 128, and 256 examples. At the primary budget of 128, RSP and RSP-Drop obtain dataset-averaged Macro-F1 scores of 47.55 and 48.28, respectively, compared with 45.11 for entropy-pool-matched random selection. Their relative performance varies across datasets and budgets. A selected-set case study identifies contrasting clean-margin profiles among the examples exchanged by the two rules, while a full-pool ablation shows that entropy prefiltering is not uniformly beneficial. These retrospective results characterize the empirical utility and limitations of perturbation-based selection under a fixed adaptation protocol. Evaluation uses one backbone and benchmarks with documented training-family overlap; it does not establish clinical effectiveness.