Interpretation is critical for disease diagnosis, but existing models struggle to balance predictive accuracy with human-understandable rationales. While large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning abilities, their clinical use is limited by high computational costs and restricted multimodal reasoning ability. Small language models (SLMs) are efficient but lack advanced reasoning for integrating multimodal medical data. In addition, both LLMs and SLMs lack domain knowledge for trustworthy reasoning. Therefore, we propose ClinRaGen, enhancing SLMs by leveraging LLM-derived reasoning ability via rationale distillation and domain knowledge injection for trustworthy multimodal rationale generation. Key innovations include a sequential rationale distillation framework that equips SLMs with LLM-comparable multimodal reasoning abilities, and a knowledge-augmented attention mechanism that jointly unifies multimodal representation from time series and textual data in the same encoding space, enabling it to be naturally interpreted by SLMs while incorporating domain knowledge for reliable rationale generation. Experiments on real-world medical datasets show that ClinRaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in disease diagnosis and rationale generation, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining LLM-driven reasoning with knowledge augmentation for improved interpretability.

Driven by recent advances in neural networks, various Deep Embedding Clustering (DEC) based short text clustering models are being developed. In these works, latent representation learning and text clustering are performed simultaneously. Although these methods are becoming increasingly popular, they use pure cluster-oriented objectives, which can produce meaningless representations. To alleviate this problem, several improvements have been developed to introduce additional learning objectives in the clustering process, such as models based on contrastive learning. However, existing efforts rely heavily on learning meaningful representations at the instance level. They have limited focus on learning global representations, which are necessary to capture the overall data structure at the cluster level. In this paper, we propose a novel DEC model, which we named the deep embedded clustering model with cluster-level representation learning (DECCRL) to jointly learn cluster and instance level representations. Here, we extend the embedded topic modelling approach to introduce reconstruction constraints to help learn cluster-level representations. Experimental results on real-world short text datasets demonstrate that our model produces meaningful clusters.