HiMed: Incentivizing Hindi Reasoning in Medical LLMs

Dingfeng Jiang, Han Yan, Chenze Ma, Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Ang Li, Yunxiang Jiang, Xinlei Xiong, Juhao Liang, Hongru Xiao, Xiang Li, Fan Bu, Jiale Han, Ruchir Gupta, Prayag Tiwari, Benyou Wang


Abstract
Medical large language models hold promise for reducing healthcare disparities, yet Hindi remains severely underrepresented. While medical LLMs excel in high-resource languages, their performance degrades sharply in Hindi, particularly on Indian systems of medicine. We argue that robust cross-lingual medical transfer requires Hindi reasoning. To this end, we introduce HiMed, a Hindi reasoning medical corpus and benchmark suite covering both Western and Indian medicine. We further propose HiMed-8B, a Hindi-form medical reasoning LLM, through the design of decaying scaffolding reward. Extensive experiments demonstrate improvement in Hindi medical reasoning performance and a reduction in the English–Hindi accuracy gap. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each training stage and reward component. All code, data, and weights are available.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.117
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2399–2428
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.117/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Dingfeng Jiang, Han Yan, Chenze Ma, Amit Kumar Jaiswal, Ang Li, Yunxiang Jiang, Xinlei Xiong, Juhao Liang, Hongru Xiao, Xiang Li, Fan Bu, Jiale Han, Ruchir Gupta, Prayag Tiwari, and Benyou Wang. 2026. HiMed: Incentivizing Hindi Reasoning in Medical LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 2399–2428, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HiMed: Incentivizing Hindi Reasoning in Medical LLMs (Jiang et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.117.pdf