Future Querying: Can LLMs Serve as Implicit Medical World Models?
TL;DR
This work introduces future querying, a paradigm that probes whether large language models can function as implicit medical world models by evaluating their ability to answer time-indexed clinical queries about a patient's future, and shows that small, locally fine-tuned open-weight models can match or approach larger proprietary systems, making the framework suitable for privacy-preserving, on-premise deployment.
Abstract
Traditional clinical prediction models rely on task-specific pipelines and curated, structured data, which scale poorly and underutilize unstructured text. To address this, we introduce future querying, a paradigm that probes whether large language models (LLMs) can function as implicit medical world models by evaluating their ability to answer time-indexed clinical queries about a patient's future. Our framework operates on unstructured clinical documentation using endpoint-agnostic training, enabling a single model to answer diverse clinical queries over patient trajectories without manual feature engineering or task-specific retraining. We show that small, locally fine-tuned open-weight models can match or approach larger proprietary systems, making the framework suitable for privacy-preserving, on-premise deployment. Evaluated on a new synthetic medical reports dataset and real ICU notes from the MIMIC-IV dataset, our results provide encouraging evidence that LLMs can capture aspects of clinical dynamics.