Model and Task-Aware Test-Time Scaling Strategies for Large Language and Vision-Language Models in Medicine: Evaluation Study

On Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

Test-time scaling is a paradigm where large models use additional compute at inference to achieve better performance, without changing model weights. While it has been widely studied for Large Language Models (LLMs), its applicability to Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remains less explored and analyzed, with limited analysis of whether, when, and to what extent these approaches transfer to LVLMs. In this work, we ask a simple but fundamental question: can conventional test-time scaling methods developed for LLMs be directly applied to LVLMs? We present the first comprehensive study of test-time scaling for LVLMs, spanning multiple models and model sizes, nine test-time scaling methods, and six diverse benchmarks. Our main findings is that 1) different from previous findings, small, well-performing models benefit the most from test-time scaling, enabling performance improvements of up to around 30\%, reaching large models performance, and often outperforming them, 2) LVLMs lose focus when given more compute than necessary, and 3) Visual information is encoded early in the reasoning chain, after which the chain is dominated by text-only reasoning and the contribution of image tokens drops significantly. Finally, we also provide a global and fine-grained analysis on the quality and information sufficiency of the reasoning chains produced. Overall, our findings and analysis provide practical guidance and insights into LVLMs and their deployment in research and industry.

NuclearQAv2: A Structured Benchmark for Evaluating Domain-Science Competence in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of tasks, but ensuring their reliability in highly technical domains remains a significant challenge. In nuclear engineering, problem solving often requires not only factual knowledge but also quantitative reasoning and conceptual understanding. To address the need for systematic evaluation in this domain, we introduce NuclearQAv2, a benchmark for assessing LLMs on nuclear engineering knowledge. The benchmark comprises approximately 1,240 question-answer pairs spanning three categories: boolean, numeric, and verbal. NuclearQAv2 is constructed using a hybrid pipeline that combines expert-authored questions, existing datasets, and LLM-assisted generation from domain-specific technical corpora. By leveraging structured prompting for both automated question generation and response evaluation, the proposed framework enables scalable benchmark construction and evaluation. We evaluate a diverse set of LLMs using NuclearQAv2 and observe substantial performance differences across task types. While the models generally perform well on factual questions, quantitative reasoning and conceptual understanding remain considerably more challenging. These results highlight the importance of multi-faceted evaluation frameworks and establish NuclearQAv2 as a scalable benchmark for assessing LLM capabilities in technical domains.

Tutorial: guidance on the use of large language models for medical research

This entry-level tutorial aims to equip healthcare professionals with the tools necessary to effectively integrate LLMs into clinical practice, ensuring that these powerful technologies are applied in a safe, reliable, and impactful manner.

Domain-specific versus general large language models: a review and empirical benchmark in real medical texts

It is suggested that domain-adapted encoder models may be preferable for similar structured clinical NER settings, although larger and externally validated benchmarks are needed before generalizing to other languages, clinical corpora, model families, or deployment environments.

Cross Domain Test Time Scaling: Scale Knowledge and Reasoning on Cross Domains

DiverValue-Bench: A Benchmark and Fine-Tuning Framework for Aligning Large Language Models with Diverse Human Values

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse human values is essential for safe and effective deployment, yet existing benchmarks often overlook cultural and demographic variation. We introduce DiverValue-Bench, a population-aware benchmark for evaluating multi-dimensional value alignment across 74 countries/regions. It contains 23,763 quality-controlled instances derived from PRISM user feedback and audited through large-scale human validation, with fine-grained value labels, personalized questions, contrastive reference answers, and rich demographic metadata. Using DiverValue-Bench, we evaluate representative LLMs and reveal substantial geographic and demographic disparities that are masked by aggregate performance. We further show that lightweight preference-based fine-tuning with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) substantially improves in-domain value alignment while yielding consistent out-of-domain gains. These results highlight the need for population-aware alignment evaluation and demonstrate the utility of DiverValue-Bench as a practical foundation for global alignment, personalized value modeling, and equitable AI development.