OpenMedLM: Prompt engineering can out-perform fine-tuning in medical question-answering with open-source large language models

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Main Authors: Maharjan, Jenish, Garikipati, Anurag, Singh, Navan Preet, Cyrus, Leo, Sharma, Mayank, Ciobanu, Madalina, Barnes, Gina, Thapa, Rahul, Mao, Qingqing, Das, Ritankar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Maharjan, Jenish
Garikipati, Anurag
Singh, Navan Preet
Cyrus, Leo
Sharma, Mayank
Ciobanu, Madalina
Barnes, Gina
Thapa, Rahul
Mao, Qingqing
Das, Ritankar
author_facet Maharjan, Jenish
Garikipati, Anurag
Singh, Navan Preet
Cyrus, Leo
Sharma, Mayank
Ciobanu, Madalina
Barnes, Gina
Thapa, Rahul
Mao, Qingqing
Das, Ritankar
contents LLMs have become increasingly capable at accomplishing a range of specialized-tasks and can be utilized to expand equitable access to medical knowledge. Most medical LLMs have involved extensive fine-tuning, leveraging specialized medical data and significant, thus costly, amounts of computational power. Many of the top performing LLMs are proprietary and their access is limited to very few research groups. However, open-source (OS) models represent a key area of growth for medical LLMs due to significant improvements in performance and an inherent ability to provide the transparency and compliance required in healthcare. We present OpenMedLM, a prompting platform which delivers state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for OS LLMs on medical benchmarks. We evaluated a range of OS foundation LLMs (7B-70B) on four medical benchmarks (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU medical-subset). We employed a series of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought (random selection and kNN selection), and ensemble/self-consistency voting. We found that OpenMedLM delivers OS SOTA results on three common medical LLM benchmarks, surpassing the previous best performing OS models that leveraged computationally costly extensive fine-tuning. The model delivers a 72.6% accuracy on the MedQA benchmark, outperforming the previous SOTA by 2.4%, and achieves 81.7% accuracy on the MMLU medical-subset, establishing itself as the first OS LLM to surpass 80% accuracy on this benchmark. Our results highlight medical-specific emergent properties in OS LLMs which have not yet been documented to date elsewhere, and showcase the benefits of further leveraging prompt engineering to improve the performance of accessible LLMs for medical applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_19371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OpenMedLM: Prompt engineering can out-perform fine-tuning in medical question-answering with open-source large language models
Maharjan, Jenish
Garikipati, Anurag
Singh, Navan Preet
Cyrus, Leo
Sharma, Mayank
Ciobanu, Madalina
Barnes, Gina
Thapa, Rahul
Mao, Qingqing
Das, Ritankar
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
LLMs have become increasingly capable at accomplishing a range of specialized-tasks and can be utilized to expand equitable access to medical knowledge. Most medical LLMs have involved extensive fine-tuning, leveraging specialized medical data and significant, thus costly, amounts of computational power. Many of the top performing LLMs are proprietary and their access is limited to very few research groups. However, open-source (OS) models represent a key area of growth for medical LLMs due to significant improvements in performance and an inherent ability to provide the transparency and compliance required in healthcare. We present OpenMedLM, a prompting platform which delivers state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for OS LLMs on medical benchmarks. We evaluated a range of OS foundation LLMs (7B-70B) on four medical benchmarks (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU medical-subset). We employed a series of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought (random selection and kNN selection), and ensemble/self-consistency voting. We found that OpenMedLM delivers OS SOTA results on three common medical LLM benchmarks, surpassing the previous best performing OS models that leveraged computationally costly extensive fine-tuning. The model delivers a 72.6% accuracy on the MedQA benchmark, outperforming the previous SOTA by 2.4%, and achieves 81.7% accuracy on the MMLU medical-subset, establishing itself as the first OS LLM to surpass 80% accuracy on this benchmark. Our results highlight medical-specific emergent properties in OS LLMs which have not yet been documented to date elsewhere, and showcase the benefits of further leveraging prompt engineering to improve the performance of accessible LLMs for medical applications.
title OpenMedLM: Prompt engineering can out-perform fine-tuning in medical question-answering with open-source large language models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19371