Augmenting Black-box LLMs with Medical Textbooks for Biomedical Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Yubo, Ma, Xueguang, Chen, Wenhu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912240541630464
author Wang, Yubo
Ma, Xueguang
Chen, Wenhu
author_facet Wang, Yubo
Ma, Xueguang
Chen, Wenhu
contents Large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating responses based on human instructions. However, their use in the medical field can be challenging due to their lack of specific, in-depth knowledge. In this study, we present a system called LLMs Augmented with Medical Textbooks (LLM-AMT) designed to enhance the proficiency of LLMs in specialized domains. LLM-AMT integrates authoritative medical textbooks into the LLMs' framework using plug-and-play modules. These modules include a Query Augmenter, a Hybrid Textbook Retriever, and a Knowledge Self-Refiner. Together, they incorporate authoritative medical knowledge. Additionally, an LLM Reader aids in contextual understanding. Our experimental results on three medical QA tasks demonstrate that LLMAMT significantly improves response quality, with accuracy gains ranging from 11.6% to 16.6%. Notably, with GPT-4-Turbo as the base model, LLM-AMT outperforms the specialized Med-PaLM 2 model pre-trained on a massive amount of medical corpus by 2-3%. We found that despite being 100x smaller in size, medical textbooks as a retrieval corpus is proven to be a more effective knowledge database than Wikipedia in the medical domain, boosting performance by 7.8%-13.7%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_02233
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Augmenting Black-box LLMs with Medical Textbooks for Biomedical Question Answering
Wang, Yubo
Ma, Xueguang
Chen, Wenhu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating responses based on human instructions. However, their use in the medical field can be challenging due to their lack of specific, in-depth knowledge. In this study, we present a system called LLMs Augmented with Medical Textbooks (LLM-AMT) designed to enhance the proficiency of LLMs in specialized domains. LLM-AMT integrates authoritative medical textbooks into the LLMs' framework using plug-and-play modules. These modules include a Query Augmenter, a Hybrid Textbook Retriever, and a Knowledge Self-Refiner. Together, they incorporate authoritative medical knowledge. Additionally, an LLM Reader aids in contextual understanding. Our experimental results on three medical QA tasks demonstrate that LLMAMT significantly improves response quality, with accuracy gains ranging from 11.6% to 16.6%. Notably, with GPT-4-Turbo as the base model, LLM-AMT outperforms the specialized Med-PaLM 2 model pre-trained on a massive amount of medical corpus by 2-3%. We found that despite being 100x smaller in size, medical textbooks as a retrieval corpus is proven to be a more effective knowledge database than Wikipedia in the medical domain, boosting performance by 7.8%-13.7%.
title Augmenting Black-box LLMs with Medical Textbooks for Biomedical Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02233