Enhancing Small Medical Learners with Privacy-preserving Contextual Prompting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Xinlu, Li, Shiyang, Yang, Xianjun, Tian, Chenxin, Qin, Yao, Petzold, Linda Ruth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Zhang, Xinlu
Li, Shiyang
Yang, Xianjun
Tian, Chenxin
Qin, Yao
Petzold, Linda Ruth
author_facet Zhang, Xinlu
Li, Shiyang
Yang, Xianjun
Tian, Chenxin
Qin, Yao
Petzold, Linda Ruth
contents Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable medical expertise, but data privacy concerns impede their direct use in healthcare environments. Although offering improved data privacy protection, domain-specific small language models (SLMs) often underperform LLMs, emphasizing the need for methods that reduce this performance gap while alleviating privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method that harnesses LLMs' medical proficiency to boost SLM performance in medical tasks under privacy-restricted scenarios. Specifically, we mitigate patient privacy issues by extracting keywords from medical data and prompting the LLM to generate a medical knowledge-intensive context by simulating clinicians' thought processes. This context serves as additional input for SLMs, augmenting their decision-making capabilities. Our method significantly enhances performance in both few-shot and full training settings across three medical knowledge-intensive tasks, achieving up to a 22.57% increase in absolute accuracy compared to SLM fine-tuning without context, and sets new state-of-the-art results in two medical tasks within privacy-restricted scenarios. Further out-of-domain testing and experiments in two general domain datasets showcase its generalizability and broad applicability. Our code can be found at https://github.com/XZhang97666/PrivacyBoost-SLM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_12723
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Small Medical Learners with Privacy-preserving Contextual Prompting
Zhang, Xinlu
Li, Shiyang
Yang, Xianjun
Tian, Chenxin
Qin, Yao
Petzold, Linda Ruth
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable medical expertise, but data privacy concerns impede their direct use in healthcare environments. Although offering improved data privacy protection, domain-specific small language models (SLMs) often underperform LLMs, emphasizing the need for methods that reduce this performance gap while alleviating privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method that harnesses LLMs' medical proficiency to boost SLM performance in medical tasks under privacy-restricted scenarios. Specifically, we mitigate patient privacy issues by extracting keywords from medical data and prompting the LLM to generate a medical knowledge-intensive context by simulating clinicians' thought processes. This context serves as additional input for SLMs, augmenting their decision-making capabilities. Our method significantly enhances performance in both few-shot and full training settings across three medical knowledge-intensive tasks, achieving up to a 22.57% increase in absolute accuracy compared to SLM fine-tuning without context, and sets new state-of-the-art results in two medical tasks within privacy-restricted scenarios. Further out-of-domain testing and experiments in two general domain datasets showcase its generalizability and broad applicability. Our code can be found at https://github.com/XZhang97666/PrivacyBoost-SLM.
title Enhancing Small Medical Learners with Privacy-preserving Contextual Prompting
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12723