@inproceedings{deng-etal-2026-learning,
title = "Learning What to Ignore: Mitigating Negative Transfer in Medical Knowledge Fusion via Clinical Task-Adaptive Selection",
author = "Deng, Xinyan and
Dong, Shoubin and
Zheng, Xiaorou",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1067/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1067",
pages = "23295--23309",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Integrating external medical knowledge into longitudinal electronic health record modeling is a prevailing paradigm to mitigate clinical data sparsity. However, existing approaches face a reliability-timeliness dilemma, struggling to balance the structural authority of static ontologies with the reasoning flexibility of large language models. Furthermore, most frameworks overlook the risk of relative negative transfer, where indiscriminately fusing task-irrelevant knowledge can introduce noise or even cause conflicts that weakens patient-specific signals. In this paper, we propose TrustKE, a Trustworthy Knowledge Enhancement framework. First, we construct a dual-layer knowledge graph that anchors dynamic, evidence-based chain-of-thought reasoning from medical literature within the stable structure of medical knowledge graph. Second, we introduce a task-adaptive knowledge selection mechanism that dynamically optimizes the graph, retaining only task-specific signals. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV across four clinical tasks show that TrustKE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our analysis confirms that TrustKE effectively mitigates negative transfer while offering transparent reasoning for clinical decision-making."
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<abstract>Integrating external medical knowledge into longitudinal electronic health record modeling is a prevailing paradigm to mitigate clinical data sparsity. However, existing approaches face a reliability-timeliness dilemma, struggling to balance the structural authority of static ontologies with the reasoning flexibility of large language models. Furthermore, most frameworks overlook the risk of relative negative transfer, where indiscriminately fusing task-irrelevant knowledge can introduce noise or even cause conflicts that weakens patient-specific signals. In this paper, we propose TrustKE, a Trustworthy Knowledge Enhancement framework. First, we construct a dual-layer knowledge graph that anchors dynamic, evidence-based chain-of-thought reasoning from medical literature within the stable structure of medical knowledge graph. Second, we introduce a task-adaptive knowledge selection mechanism that dynamically optimizes the graph, retaining only task-specific signals. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV across four clinical tasks show that TrustKE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our analysis confirms that TrustKE effectively mitigates negative transfer while offering transparent reasoning for clinical decision-making.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Learning What to Ignore: Mitigating Negative Transfer in Medical Knowledge Fusion via Clinical Task-Adaptive Selection
%A Deng, Xinyan
%A Dong, Shoubin
%A Zheng, Xiaorou
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F deng-etal-2026-learning
%X Integrating external medical knowledge into longitudinal electronic health record modeling is a prevailing paradigm to mitigate clinical data sparsity. However, existing approaches face a reliability-timeliness dilemma, struggling to balance the structural authority of static ontologies with the reasoning flexibility of large language models. Furthermore, most frameworks overlook the risk of relative negative transfer, where indiscriminately fusing task-irrelevant knowledge can introduce noise or even cause conflicts that weakens patient-specific signals. In this paper, we propose TrustKE, a Trustworthy Knowledge Enhancement framework. First, we construct a dual-layer knowledge graph that anchors dynamic, evidence-based chain-of-thought reasoning from medical literature within the stable structure of medical knowledge graph. Second, we introduce a task-adaptive knowledge selection mechanism that dynamically optimizes the graph, retaining only task-specific signals. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV across four clinical tasks show that TrustKE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our analysis confirms that TrustKE effectively mitigates negative transfer while offering transparent reasoning for clinical decision-making.
%R 10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1067
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1067/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.1067
%P 23295-23309
Markdown (Informal)
[Learning What to Ignore: Mitigating Negative Transfer in Medical Knowledge Fusion via Clinical Task-Adaptive Selection](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1067/) (Deng et al., ACL 2026)
ACL