Continual Pre-training (CPT) serves as a fundamental approach for adapting foundation models to domain-specific applications. Scaling laws for pre-training define a power-law relationship between dataset size and the test loss of an LLM. However, the marginal gains from simply increasing data for CPT diminish rapidly, yielding suboptimal data utilization and inefficient training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel perplexity-aware data scaling law to establish a predictive relationship between the perplexity landscape of domain-specific data and the test loss. Our approach leverages the pre-trained model’s own perplexity on domain data as a proxy for estimating the knowledge gap, effectively quantifying the informational perplexity landscape of candidate training samples. By fitting this scaling law across diverse perplexity regimes, we enable adaptive selection of high-utility data subsets, prioritizing content that maximizes knowledge absorption while minimizing redundancy and noise. Extensive experiments on both medical and general-domain benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently identifies near-optimal training subsets, achieving superior performance with significantly reduced data consumption.

Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate expert-level medical knowledge, aligning their open-ended outputs with fine-grained clinician preferences remains challenging. Existing methods often rely on coarse objectives or unreliable automated judges that are weakly grounded in professional guidelines. We propose a two-stage framework to address this gap. First, we introduce HealthRubrics, a dataset of 7,034 physician-verified preference examples in which clinicians refine LLM-drafted rubrics to meet rigorous medical standards. Second, we distill these rubrics into HealthPrinciples: 119 broadly reusable, clinically grounded principles organized by clinical dimensions, enabling scalable supervision beyond manual annotation. We use HealthPrinciples for (1) offline alignment by synthesizing rubrics for unlabeled queries and (2) an inference-time tool for guided self-revision. A 30A3B model with our framework achieves 33.4% on HealthBench-Hard, outperforming much larger models including Deepseek-R1 and o3, establishing a resource-efficient baseline for clinical alignment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for passage reranking in information retrieval, leveraging their superior reasoning capabilities to address the limitations of conventional models on complex queries. However, current LLM-based reranking paradigms are fundamentally constrained by an efficiency-accuracy trade-off: (1) pointwise methods are efficient but ignore inter-document comparison, yielding suboptimal accuracy; (2) listwise methods capture global context but suffer from context-window constraints and prohibitive inference latency. To address these issues, we propose GroupRank, a novel paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness. To unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking, we propose an answer-free data synthesis pipeline that fuses local pointwise signals with global listwise rankings. These samples facilitate supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, with the latter guided by a specialized group-ranking reward comprising ranking-utility and group-alignment. These complementary components synergistically optimize document ordering and score calibration to reflect intrinsic query-document relevance.Experimental results show GroupRank achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED, while delivering a 6.4× inference speedup. The code is available at https://github.com/AQ-MedAI/Diver/tree/main/Reranker/GroupRank.