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Dec 10

Privacy-Preserving LLM Interaction with Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Databases

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as personal agents, accessing sensitive user data such as calendars, emails, and medical records. Users currently face a trade-off: They can send private records, many of which are stored in remote databases, to powerful but untrusted LLM providers, increasing their exposure risk. Alternatively, they can run less powerful models locally on trusted devices. We bridge this gap. Our Socratic Chain-of-Thought Reasoning first sends a generic, non-private user query to a powerful, untrusted LLM, which generates a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompt and detailed sub-queries without accessing user data. Next, we embed these sub-queries and perform encrypted sub-second semantic search using our Homomorphically Encrypted Vector Database across one million entries of a single user's private data. This represents a realistic scale of personal documents, emails, and records accumulated over years of digital activity. Finally, we feed the CoT prompt and the decrypted records to a local language model and generate the final response. On the LoCoMo long-context QA benchmark, our hybrid framework, combining GPT-4o with a local Llama-3.2-1B model, outperforms using GPT-4o alone by up to 7.1 percentage points. This demonstrates a first step toward systems where tasks are decomposed and split between untrusted strong LLMs and weak local ones, preserving user privacy.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 19

Lita: Light Agent Uncovers the Agentic Coding Capabilities of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to programming tasks, ranging from single-turn code completion to autonomous agents. Current code agent designs frequently depend on complex, hand-crafted workflows and tool sets. However, this reliance on elaborate scaffolding presents several challenges: agent performance becomes overly dependent on prompt tuning and custom design choices, heavy human intervention obscures a model's true underlying capabilities, and intricate pipelines are costly to build and maintain. Furthermore, optimizing complex task prompts increases the risk of data leakage. Currently, when introducing new models, LLM providers like OpenAI and Anthropic often publish benchmark scores to demonstrate their models' coding proficiency, but keep their proprietary evaluation frameworks confidential. To address these limitations, we introduce Lita (Lite Agent), which operationalizes liteness, a principle of minimizing manual design while retaining the essential elements of a fully autonomous agent. Lita enables a more faithful and unified evaluation without elaborate scaffolding. Experiments on the Aider Polyglot and SWE-Bench with frontier models demonstrate that Lita achieves competitive or superior performance compared to workflow-based and agentic baselines. Crucially, Lita also consumes fewer tokens and requires significantly less design effort. Our results suggest that Lita is sufficient to reveal the underlying coding competence of modern LLMs. Finally, we propose the Agent Complexity Law: the performance gap between agents of varying complexity, from simple to sophisticated designs, will shrink as the core model improves, ultimately converging to a negligible difference.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 30

SCBench: A KV Cache-Centric Analysis of Long-Context Methods

Long-context LLMs have enabled numerous downstream applications but also introduced significant challenges related to computational and memory efficiency. To address these challenges, optimizations for long-context inference have been developed, centered around the KV cache. However, existing benchmarks often evaluate in single-request, neglecting the full lifecycle of the KV cache in real-world use. This oversight is particularly critical, as KV cache reuse has become widely adopted in LLMs inference frameworks, such as vLLM and SGLang, as well as by LLM providers, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic. To address this gap, we introduce SCBench(SharedContextBench), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating long-context methods from a KV cachecentric perspective: 1) KV cache generation, 2) KV cache compression, 3) KV cache retrieval, 4) KV cache loading. Specifically, SCBench uses test examples with shared context, ranging 12 tasks with two shared context modes, covering four categories of long-context capabilities: string retrieval, semantic retrieval, global information, and multi-task. With it, we provide an extensive KV cache-centric analysis of eight categories long-context solutions, including Gated Linear RNNs, Mamba-Attention hybrids, and efficient methods such as sparse attention, KV cache dropping, quantization, retrieval, loading, and prompt compression. The evaluation is conducted on 8 long-context LLMs. Our findings show that sub-O(n) memory methods suffer in multi-turn scenarios, while sparse encoding with O(n) memory and sub-O(n^2) pre-filling computation perform robustly. Dynamic sparsity yields more expressive KV caches than static patterns, and layer-level sparsity in hybrid architectures reduces memory usage with strong performance. Additionally, we identify attention distribution shift issues in long-generation scenarios. https://aka.ms/SCBench.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024 2

Breaking Agent Backbones: Evaluating the Security of Backbone LLMs in AI Agents

AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are being deployed at scale, yet we lack a systematic understanding of how the choice of backbone LLM affects agent security. The non-deterministic sequential nature of AI agents complicates security modeling, while the integration of traditional software with AI components entangles novel LLM vulnerabilities with conventional security risks. Existing frameworks only partially address these challenges as they either capture specific vulnerabilities only or require modeling of complete agents. To address these limitations, we introduce threat snapshots: a framework that isolates specific states in an agent's execution flow where LLM vulnerabilities manifest, enabling the systematic identification and categorization of security risks that propagate from the LLM to the agent level. We apply this framework to construct the b^3 benchmark, a security benchmark based on 194331 unique crowdsourced adversarial attacks. We then evaluate 31 popular LLMs with it, revealing, among other insights, that enhanced reasoning capabilities improve security, while model size does not correlate with security. We release our benchmark, dataset, and evaluation code to facilitate widespread adoption by LLM providers and practitioners, offering guidance for agent developers and incentivizing model developers to prioritize backbone security improvements.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 26

CySecBench: Generative AI-based CyberSecurity-focused Prompt Dataset for Benchmarking Large Language Models

Numerous studies have investigated methods for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate harmful content. Typically, these methods are evaluated using datasets of malicious prompts designed to bypass security policies established by LLM providers. However, the generally broad scope and open-ended nature of existing datasets can complicate the assessment of jailbreaking effectiveness, particularly in specific domains, notably cybersecurity. To address this issue, we present and publicly release CySecBench, a comprehensive dataset containing 12662 prompts specifically designed to evaluate jailbreaking techniques in the cybersecurity domain. The dataset is organized into 10 distinct attack-type categories, featuring close-ended prompts to enable a more consistent and accurate assessment of jailbreaking attempts. Furthermore, we detail our methodology for dataset generation and filtration, which can be adapted to create similar datasets in other domains. To demonstrate the utility of CySecBench, we propose and evaluate a jailbreaking approach based on prompt obfuscation. Our experimental results show that this method successfully elicits harmful content from commercial black-box LLMs, achieving Success Rates (SRs) of 65% with ChatGPT and 88% with Gemini; in contrast, Claude demonstrated greater resilience with a jailbreaking SR of 17%. Compared to existing benchmark approaches, our method shows superior performance, highlighting the value of domain-specific evaluation datasets for assessing LLM security measures. Moreover, when evaluated using prompts from a widely used dataset (i.e., AdvBench), it achieved an SR of 78.5%, higher than the state-of-the-art methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 2

POLCA: Power Oversubscription in LLM Cloud Providers

Recent innovation in large language models (LLMs), and their myriad use-cases have rapidly driven up the compute capacity demand for datacenter GPUs. Several cloud providers and other enterprises have made substantial plans of growth in their datacenters to support these new workloads. One of the key bottleneck resources in datacenters is power, and given the increasing model sizes of LLMs, they are becoming increasingly power intensive. In this paper, we show that there is a significant opportunity to oversubscribe power in LLM clusters. Power oversubscription improves the power efficiency of these datacenters, allowing more deployable servers per datacenter, and reduces the deployment time, since building new datacenters is slow. We extensively characterize the power consumption patterns of a variety of LLMs and their configurations. We identify the differences between the inference and training power consumption patterns. Based on our analysis of these LLMs, we claim that the average and peak power utilization in LLM clusters for inference should not be very high. Our deductions align with the data from production LLM clusters, revealing that inference workloads offer substantial headroom for power oversubscription. However, the stringent set of telemetry and controls that GPUs offer in a virtualized environment, makes it challenging to have a reliable and robust power oversubscription mechanism. We propose POLCA, our framework for power oversubscription that is robust, reliable, and readily deployable for GPU clusters. Using open-source models to replicate the power patterns observed in production, we simulate POLCA and demonstrate that we can deploy 30% more servers in the same GPU cluster for inference, with minimal performance loss

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 24, 2023

From Judgment to Interference: Early Stopping LLM Harmful Outputs via Streaming Content Monitoring

Though safety alignment has been applied to most large language models (LLMs), LLM service providers generally deploy a subsequent moderation as the external safety guardrail in real-world products. Existing moderators mainly practice a conventional full detection, which determines the harmfulness based on the complete LLM output, causing high service latency. Recent works pay more attention to partial detection where moderators oversee the generation midway and early stop the output if harmfulness is detected, but they directly apply moderators trained with the full detection paradigm to incomplete outputs, introducing a training-inference gap that lowers the performance. In this paper, we explore how to form a data-and-model solution that natively supports partial detection. For the data, we construct FineHarm, a dataset consisting of 29K prompt-response pairs with fine-grained annotations to provide reasonable supervision for token-level training. Then, we propose the streaming content monitor, which is trained with dual supervision of response- and token-level labels and can follow the output stream of LLM to make a timely judgment of harmfulness. Experiments show that SCM gains 0.95+ in macro F1 score that is comparable to full detection, by only seeing the first 18% of tokens in responses on average. Moreover, the SCM can serve as a pseudo-harmfulness annotator for improving safety alignment and lead to a higher harmlessness score than DPO.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 11

Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers

Should a large language model (LLM) be used as a therapist? In this paper, we investigate the use of LLMs to *replace* mental health providers, a use case promoted in the tech startup and research space. We conduct a mapping review of therapy guides used by major medical institutions to identify crucial aspects of therapeutic relationships, such as the importance of a therapeutic alliance between therapist and client. We then assess the ability of LLMs to reproduce and adhere to these aspects of therapeutic relationships by conducting several experiments investigating the responses of current LLMs, such as `gpt-4o`. Contrary to best practices in the medical community, LLMs 1) express stigma toward those with mental health conditions and 2) respond inappropriately to certain common (and critical) conditions in naturalistic therapy settings -- e.g., LLMs encourage clients' delusional thinking, likely due to their sycophancy. This occurs even with larger and newer LLMs, indicating that current safety practices may not address these gaps. Furthermore, we note foundational and practical barriers to the adoption of LLMs as therapists, such as that a therapeutic alliance requires human characteristics (e.g., identity and stakes). For these reasons, we conclude that LLMs should not replace therapists, and we discuss alternative roles for LLMs in clinical therapy.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 25

CoIn: Counting the Invisible Reasoning Tokens in Commercial Opaque LLM APIs

As post-training techniques evolve, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly augmented with structured multi-step reasoning abilities, often optimized through reinforcement learning. These reasoning-enhanced models outperform standard LLMs on complex tasks and now underpin many commercial LLM APIs. However, to protect proprietary behavior and reduce verbosity, providers typically conceal the reasoning traces while returning only the final answer. This opacity introduces a critical transparency gap: users are billed for invisible reasoning tokens, which often account for the majority of the cost, yet have no means to verify their authenticity. This opens the door to token count inflation, where providers may overreport token usage or inject synthetic, low-effort tokens to inflate charges. To address this issue, we propose CoIn, a verification framework that audits both the quantity and semantic validity of hidden tokens. CoIn constructs a verifiable hash tree from token embedding fingerprints to check token counts, and uses embedding-based relevance matching to detect fabricated reasoning content. Experiments demonstrate that CoIn, when deployed as a trusted third-party auditor, can effectively detect token count inflation with a success rate reaching up to 94.7%, showing the strong ability to restore billing transparency in opaque LLM services. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/CASE-Lab-UMD/LLM-Auditing-CoIn.

  • 10 authors
·
May 19 2

Running in CIRCLE? A Simple Benchmark for LLM Code Interpreter Security

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly integrate native code interpreters, they enable powerful real-time execution capabilities, substantially expanding their utility. However, such integrations introduce potential system-level cybersecurity threats, fundamentally different from prompt-based vulnerabilities. To systematically evaluate these interpreter-specific risks, we propose CIRCLE (Code-Interpreter Resilience Check for LLM Exploits), a simple benchmark comprising 1,260 prompts targeting CPU, memory, and disk resource exhaustion. Each risk category includes explicitly malicious ("direct") and plausibly benign ("indirect") prompt variants. Our automated evaluation framework assesses not only whether LLMs refuse or generates risky code, but also executes the generated code within the interpreter environment to evaluate code correctness, simplifications made by the LLM to make the code safe, or execution timeouts. Evaluating 7 commercially available models from OpenAI and Google, we uncover significant and inconsistent vulnerabilities. For instance, evaluations show substantial disparities even within providers - OpenAI's o4-mini correctly refuses risky requests at 7.1%, notably higher rates compared to GPT-4.1 at 0.5%. Results particularly underscore that indirect, socially-engineered prompts substantially weaken model defenses. This highlights an urgent need for interpreter-specific cybersecurity benchmarks, dedicated mitigation tools (e.g., guardrails), and clear industry standards to guide safe and responsible deployment of LLM interpreter integrations. The benchmark dataset and evaluation code are publicly released to foster further research.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 25 2

COMPL-AI Framework: A Technical Interpretation and LLM Benchmarking Suite for the EU Artificial Intelligence Act

The EU's Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is a significant step towards responsible AI development, but lacks clear technical interpretation, making it difficult to assess models' compliance. This work presents COMPL-AI, a comprehensive framework consisting of (i) the first technical interpretation of the EU AI Act, translating its broad regulatory requirements into measurable technical requirements, with the focus on large language models (LLMs), and (ii) an open-source Act-centered benchmarking suite, based on thorough surveying and implementation of state-of-the-art LLM benchmarks. By evaluating 12 prominent LLMs in the context of COMPL-AI, we reveal shortcomings in existing models and benchmarks, particularly in areas like robustness, safety, diversity, and fairness. This work highlights the need for a shift in focus towards these aspects, encouraging balanced development of LLMs and more comprehensive regulation-aligned benchmarks. Simultaneously, COMPL-AI for the first time demonstrates the possibilities and difficulties of bringing the Act's obligations to a more concrete, technical level. As such, our work can serve as a useful first step towards having actionable recommendations for model providers, and contributes to ongoing efforts of the EU to enable application of the Act, such as the drafting of the GPAI Code of Practice.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 10, 2024

Predictive Auditing of Hidden Tokens in LLM APIs via Reasoning Length Estimation

Commercial LLM services often conceal internal reasoning traces while still charging users for every generated token, including those from hidden intermediate steps, raising concerns of token inflation and potential overbilling. This gap underscores the urgent need for reliable token auditing, yet achieving it is far from straightforward: cryptographic verification (e.g., hash-based signature) offers little assurance when providers control the entire execution pipeline, while user-side prediction struggles with the inherent variance of reasoning LLMs, where token usage fluctuates across domains and prompt styles. To bridge this gap, we present PALACE (Predictive Auditing of LLM APIs via Reasoning Token Count Estimation), a user-side framework that estimates hidden reasoning token counts from prompt-answer pairs without access to internal traces. PALACE introduces a GRPO-augmented adaptation module with a lightweight domain router, enabling dynamic calibration across diverse reasoning tasks and mitigating variance in token usage patterns. Experiments on math, coding, medical, and general reasoning benchmarks show that PALACE achieves low relative error and strong prediction accuracy, supporting both fine-grained cost auditing and inflation detection. Taken together, PALACE represents an important first step toward standardized predictive auditing, offering a practical path to greater transparency, accountability, and user trust.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 29

APEX: An Extensible and Dynamism-Aware Simulator for Automated Parallel Execution in LLM Serving

Efficiently serving Large Language Models (LLMs) requires selecting an optimal parallel execution plan, balancing computation, memory, and communication overhead. However, determining the best strategy is challenging due to varying parallelism techniques (data, pipeline, tensor) and workload characteristics (e.g., compute-intensive tasks with long prompts vs. memory-intensive tasks with long generation). We propose APEX, an LLM serving system simulator that efficiently identifies optimal parallel execution plans by considering key factors of LLM serving systems, such as memory usage, batching behavior, etc. APEX performs dynamism-aware simulation to model iteration-level batching, and leverages LLMs' repetitive structure to reduce design space, scaling efficiently to trillion-scale models. APEX abstracts the key components of LLM serving systems, including the model, batching module, quantization formats, and device clusters, enabling the simulator to be general and extensible. Simulating on a CPU, APEX evaluates execution plans for various device clusters, covering diverse LLMs and workloads. APEX finds plans up to 3.37x faster than heuristics, and also plans that reduce energy consumption by up to 45% compared to latency-optimal plans. APEX performs comprehensive evaluations, reporting key system metrics like time per output token and time to first token, which can help service providers meet SLOs. APEX identifies an optimal plan within 15 minutes on a CPU, making it 71x faster and 1234x more cost-effective than cloud-based GPU deployment. APEX can be accessed at https://github.com/microsoft/apex_plus

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Are You Getting What You Pay For? Auditing Model Substitution in LLM APIs

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) accessed via black-box APIs introduces a significant trust challenge: users pay for services based on advertised model capabilities (e.g., size, performance), but providers may covertly substitute the specified model with a cheaper, lower-quality alternative to reduce operational costs. This lack of transparency undermines fairness, erodes trust, and complicates reliable benchmarking. Detecting such substitutions is difficult due to the black-box nature, typically limiting interaction to input-output queries. This paper formalizes the problem of model substitution detection in LLM APIs. We systematically evaluate existing verification techniques, including output-based statistical tests, benchmark evaluations, and log probability analysis, under various realistic attack scenarios like model quantization, randomized substitution, and benchmark evasion. Our findings reveal the limitations of methods relying solely on text outputs, especially against subtle or adaptive attacks. While log probability analysis offers stronger guarantees when available, its accessibility is often limited. We conclude by discussing the potential of hardware-based solutions like Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) as a pathway towards provable model integrity, highlighting the trade-offs between security, performance, and provider adoption. Code is available at https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/llm-api-audit

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 6 2

FineTuneBench: How well do commercial fine-tuning APIs infuse knowledge into LLMs?

There is great interest in fine-tuning frontier large language models (LLMs) to inject new information and update existing knowledge. While commercial LLM fine-tuning APIs from providers such as OpenAI and Google promise flexible adaptation for various applications, the efficacy of fine-tuning remains unclear. In this study, we introduce FineTuneBench, an evaluation framework and dataset for understanding how well commercial fine-tuning APIs can successfully learn new and updated knowledge. We analyze five frontier LLMs with commercially available fine-tuning APIs, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, on their effectiveness in two settings: (1) ingesting novel information, such as recent news events and new people profiles, and (2) updating existing knowledge, such as updated medical guidelines and code frameworks. Our results reveal substantial shortcomings in all the models' abilities to effectively learn new information through fine-tuning, with an average generalization accuracy of 37% across all models. When updating existing knowledge, such as incorporating medical guideline updates, commercial fine-tuning APIs show even more limited capability (average generalization accuracy of 19%). Overall, fine-tuning GPT-4o mini is the most effective for infusing new knowledge and updating knowledge, followed by GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o. The fine-tuning APIs for Gemini 1.5 Flesh and Gemini 1.5 Pro are unable to learn new knowledge or update existing knowledge. These findings underscore a major shortcoming in using current commercial fine-tuning services to achieve reliable knowledge infusion in common scenarios. We open source the FineTuneBench dataset at https://github.com/kevinwu23/StanfordFineTuneBench.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024

Collab-RAG: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Complex Question Answering via White-Box and Black-Box LLM Collaboration

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often struggle to handle multi-hop question-answering tasks accurately due to irrelevant context retrieval and limited complex reasoning capabilities. We introduce Collab-RAG, a collaborative training framework that leverages mutual enhancement between a white-box small language model (SLM) and a blackbox large language model (LLM) for RAG. Specifically, the SLM decomposes complex queries into simpler sub-questions, thus enhancing the accuracy of the retrieval and facilitating more effective reasoning by the black-box LLM. Concurrently, the black-box LLM provides feedback signals to improve the SLM's decomposition capability. We observe that Collab-RAG relies solely on supervision from an affordable black-box LLM without additional distillation from frontier LLMs, yet demonstrates strong generalization across multiple black-box LLMs. Experimental evaluations across five multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that Collab-RAG substantially outperforms existing black-box-only and SLM fine-tuning baselines by 1.8%-14.2% on average. In particular, our fine-tuned 3B SLM surpasses a frozen 32B LLM in question decomposition, highlighting the efficiency of Collab-RAG in improving reasoning and retrieval for complex questions. The code of Collab-RAG is available on https://github.com/ritaranx/Collab-RAG/.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 7

Exploring the Role of Large Language Models in Cybersecurity: A Systematic Survey

With the rapid development of technology and the acceleration of digitalisation, the frequency and complexity of cyber security threats are increasing. Traditional cybersecurity approaches, often based on static rules and predefined scenarios, are struggling to adapt to the rapidly evolving nature of modern cyberattacks. There is an urgent need for more adaptive and intelligent defence strategies. The emergence of Large Language Model (LLM) provides an innovative solution to cope with the increasingly severe cyber threats, and its potential in analysing complex attack patterns, predicting threats and assisting real-time response has attracted a lot of attention in the field of cybersecurity, and exploring how to effectively use LLM to defend against cyberattacks has become a hot topic in the current research field. This survey examines the applications of LLM from the perspective of the cyber attack lifecycle, focusing on the three phases of defense reconnaissance, foothold establishment, and lateral movement, and it analyzes the potential of LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) tasks. Meanwhile, we investigate how LLM-based security solutions are deployed and applied in different network scenarios. It also summarizes the internal and external risk issues faced by LLM during its application. Finally, this survey also points out the facing risk issues and possible future research directions in this domain.

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 22

Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Soft Prompt Transfer for LLMs

Prompting has become a dominant paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs). While discrete (textual) prompts are widely used for their interpretability, soft (parameter) prompts have recently gained traction in APIs. This is because they can encode information from more training samples while minimizing the user's token usage, leaving more space in the context window for task-specific input. However, soft prompts are tightly coupled to the LLM they are tuned on, limiting their generalization to other LLMs. This constraint is particularly problematic for efficiency and privacy: (1) tuning prompts on each LLM incurs high computational costs, especially as LLMs continue to grow in size. Additionally, (2) when the LLM is hosted externally, soft prompt tuning often requires sharing private data with the LLM provider. For instance, this is the case with the NVIDIA NeMo API. To address these issues, we propose POST (Privacy Of Soft prompt Transfer), a framework that enables private tuning of soft prompts on a small model and subsequently transfers these prompts to a larger LLM. POST uses knowledge distillation to derive a small model directly from the large LLM to improve prompt transferability, tunes the soft prompt locally, optionally with differential privacy guarantees, and transfers it back to the larger LLM using a small public dataset. Our experiments show that POST reduces computational costs, preserves privacy, and effectively transfers high-utility soft prompts.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 19

"Ask Me Anything": How Comcast Uses LLMs to Assist Agents in Real Time

Customer service is how companies interface with their customers. It can contribute heavily towards the overall customer satisfaction. However, high-quality service can become expensive, creating an incentive to make it as cost efficient as possible and prompting most companies to utilize AI-powered assistants, or "chat bots". On the other hand, human-to-human interaction is still desired by customers, especially when it comes to complex scenarios such as disputes and sensitive topics like bill payment. This raises the bar for customer service agents. They need to accurately understand the customer's question or concern, identify a solution that is acceptable yet feasible (and within the company's policy), all while handling multiple conversations at once. In this work, we introduce "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) as an add-on feature to an agent-facing customer service interface. AMA allows agents to ask questions to a large language model (LLM) on demand, as they are handling customer conversations -- the LLM provides accurate responses in real-time, reducing the amount of context switching the agent needs. In our internal experiments, we find that agents using AMA versus a traditional search experience spend approximately 10% fewer seconds per conversation containing a search, translating to millions of dollars of savings annually. Agents that used the AMA feature provided positive feedback nearly 80% of the time, demonstrating its usefulness as an AI-assisted feature for customer care.

  • 5 authors
·
May 1, 2024

Parrot: Efficient Serving of LLM-based Applications with Semantic Variable

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled LLM-based applications (a.k.a. AI agents or co-pilots), a new software paradigm that combines the strength of LLM and conventional software. Diverse LLM applications from different tenants could design complex workflows using multiple LLM requests to accomplish one task. However, they have to use the over-simplified request-level API provided by today's public LLM services, losing essential application-level information. Public LLM services have to blindly optimize individual LLM requests, leading to sub-optimal end-to-end performance of LLM applications. This paper introduces Parrot, an LLM service system that focuses on the end-to-end experience of LLM-based applications. Parrot proposes Semantic Variable, a unified abstraction to expose application-level knowledge to public LLM services. A Semantic Variable annotates an input/output variable in the prompt of a request, and creates the data pipeline when connecting multiple LLM requests, providing a natural way to program LLM applications. Exposing Semantic Variables to the public LLM service allows it to perform conventional data flow analysis to uncover the correlation across multiple LLM requests. This correlation opens a brand-new optimization space for the end-to-end performance of LLM-based applications. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Parrot can achieve up to an order-of-magnitude improvement for popular and practical use cases of LLM applications.

  • 7 authors
·
May 30, 2024

A Comprehensive Survey of Small Language Models in the Era of Large Language Models: Techniques, Enhancements, Applications, Collaboration with LLMs, and Trustworthiness

Large language models (LLM) have demonstrated emergent abilities in text generation, question answering, and reasoning, facilitating various tasks and domains. Despite their proficiency in various tasks, LLMs like LaPM 540B and Llama-3.1 405B face limitations due to large parameter sizes and computational demands, often requiring cloud API use which raises privacy concerns, limits real-time applications on edge devices, and increases fine-tuning costs. Additionally, LLMs often underperform in specialized domains such as healthcare and law due to insufficient domain-specific knowledge, necessitating specialized models. Therefore, Small Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly favored for their low inference latency, cost-effectiveness, efficient development, and easy customization and adaptability. These models are particularly well-suited for resource-limited environments and domain knowledge acquisition, addressing LLMs' challenges and proving ideal for applications that require localized data handling for privacy, minimal inference latency for efficiency, and domain knowledge acquisition through lightweight fine-tuning. The rising demand for SLMs has spurred extensive research and development. However, a comprehensive survey investigating issues related to the definition, acquisition, application, enhancement, and reliability of SLM remains lacking, prompting us to conduct a detailed survey on these topics. The definition of SLMs varies widely, thus to standardize, we propose defining SLMs by their capability to perform specialized tasks and suitability for resource-constrained settings, setting boundaries based on the minimal size for emergent abilities and the maximum size sustainable under resource constraints. For other aspects, we provide a taxonomy of relevant models/methods and develop general frameworks for each category to enhance and utilize SLMs effectively.

  • 14 authors
·
Nov 3, 2024

Polaris: A Safety-focused LLM Constellation Architecture for Healthcare

We develop Polaris, the first safety-focused LLM constellation for real-time patient-AI healthcare conversations. Unlike prior LLM works in healthcare focusing on tasks like question answering, our work specifically focuses on long multi-turn voice conversations. Our one-trillion parameter constellation system is composed of several multibillion parameter LLMs as co-operative agents: a stateful primary agent that focuses on driving an engaging conversation and several specialist support agents focused on healthcare tasks performed by nurses to increase safety and reduce hallucinations. We develop a sophisticated training protocol for iterative co-training of the agents that optimize for diverse objectives. We train our models on proprietary data, clinical care plans, healthcare regulatory documents, medical manuals, and other medical reasoning documents. We align our models to speak like medical professionals, using organic healthcare conversations and simulated ones between patient actors and experienced nurses. This allows our system to express unique capabilities such as rapport building, trust building, empathy and bedside manner. Finally, we present the first comprehensive clinician evaluation of an LLM system for healthcare. We recruited over 1100 U.S. licensed nurses and over 130 U.S. licensed physicians to perform end-to-end conversational evaluations of our system by posing as patients and rating the system on several measures. We demonstrate Polaris performs on par with human nurses on aggregate across dimensions such as medical safety, clinical readiness, conversational quality, and bedside manner. Additionally, we conduct a challenging task-based evaluation of the individual specialist support agents, where we demonstrate our LLM agents significantly outperform a much larger general-purpose LLM (GPT-4) as well as from its own medium-size class (LLaMA-2 70B).

  • 26 authors
·
Mar 20, 2024

Large Language Models Illuminate a Progressive Pathway to Artificial Healthcare Assistant: A Review

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in mimicking human-level language comprehension and reasoning. This has sparked significant interest in applying LLMs to enhance various aspects of healthcare, ranging from medical education to clinical decision support. However, medicine involves multifaceted data modalities and nuanced reasoning skills, presenting challenges for integrating LLMs. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the applications and implications of LLMs in medicine. It begins by examining the fundamental applications of general-purpose and specialized LLMs, demonstrating their utilities in knowledge retrieval, research support, clinical workflow automation, and diagnostic assistance. Recognizing the inherent multimodality of medicine, the review then focuses on multimodal LLMs, investigating their ability to process diverse data types like medical imaging and EHRs to augment diagnostic accuracy. To address LLMs' limitations regarding personalization and complex clinical reasoning, the paper explores the emerging development of LLM-powered autonomous agents for healthcare. Furthermore, it summarizes the evaluation methodologies for assessing LLMs' reliability and safety in medical contexts. Overall, this review offers an extensive analysis on the transformative potential of LLMs in modern medicine. It also highlights the pivotal need for continuous optimizations and ethical oversight before these models can be effectively integrated into clinical practice. Visit https://github.com/mingze-yuan/Awesome-LLM-Healthcare for an accompanying GitHub repository containing latest papers.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 3, 2023

Spectra: A Comprehensive Study of Ternary, Quantized, and FP16 Language Models

Post-training quantization is the leading method for addressing memory-related bottlenecks in LLM inference, but unfortunately, it suffers from significant performance degradation below 4-bit precision. An alternative approach involves training compressed models directly at a low bitwidth (e.g., binary or ternary models). However, the performance, training dynamics, and scaling trends of such models are not yet well understood. To address this issue, we train and openly release the Spectra LLM suite consisting of 54 language models ranging from 99M to 3.9B parameters, trained on 300B tokens. Spectra includes FloatLMs, post-training quantized QuantLMs (3, 4, 6, and 8 bits), and ternary LLMs (TriLMs) - our improved architecture for ternary language modeling, which significantly outperforms previously proposed ternary models of a given size (in bits), matching half-precision models at scale. For example, TriLM 3.9B is (bit-wise) smaller than the half-precision FloatLM 830M, but matches half-precision FloatLM 3.9B in commonsense reasoning and knowledge benchmarks. However, TriLM 3.9B is also as toxic and stereotyping as FloatLM 3.9B, a model six times larger in size. Additionally, TriLM 3.9B lags behind FloatLM in perplexity on validation splits and web-based corpora but performs better on less noisy datasets like Lambada and PennTreeBank. To enhance understanding of low-bitwidth models, we are releasing 500+ intermediate checkpoints of the Spectra suite at https://github.com/NolanoOrg/SpectraSuite{https://github.com/NolanoOrg/SpectraSuite}.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024 3

Doing More with Less -- Implementing Routing Strategies in Large Language Model-Based Systems: An Extended Survey

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

  • 6 authors
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Feb 1

Do Large Language Models Align with Core Mental Health Counseling Competencies?

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers promising potential to alleviate the global scarcity of mental health professionals. However, LLMs' alignment with essential mental health counseling competencies remains understudied. We introduce CounselingBench, a novel NCMHCE-based benchmark evaluating LLMs across five key mental health counseling competencies. Testing 22 general-purpose and medical-finetuned LLMs, we find frontier models exceed minimum thresholds but fall short of expert-level performance, with significant variations: they excel in Intake, Assessment & Diagnosis yet struggle with Core Counseling Attributes and Professional Practice & Ethics. Medical LLMs surprisingly underperform generalist models accuracy-wise, while at the same time producing slightly higher-quality justifications but making more context-related errors. Our findings highlight the complexities of developing AI systems for mental health counseling, particularly for competencies requiring empathy and contextual understanding. We found that frontier LLMs perform at a level exceeding the minimal required level of aptitude for all key mental health counseling competencies, but fall short of expert-level performance, and that current medical LLMs do not significantly improve upon generalist models in mental health counseling competencies. This underscores the critical need for specialized, mental health counseling-specific fine-tuned LLMs that rigorously aligns with core competencies combined with appropriate human supervision before any responsible real-world deployment can be considered.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024

OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) for code have become indispensable in various domains, including code generation, reasoning tasks and agent systems.While open-access code LLMs are increasingly approaching the performance levels of proprietary models, high-quality code LLMs suitable for rigorous scientific investigation, particularly those with reproducible data processing pipelines and transparent training protocols, remain limited. The scarcity is due to various challenges, including resource constraints, ethical considerations, and the competitive advantages of keeping models advanced. To address the gap, we introduce OpenCoder, a top-tier code LLM that not only achieves performance comparable to leading models but also serves as an ``open cookbook'' for the research community. Unlike most prior efforts, we release not only model weights and inference code, but also the reproducible training data, complete data processing pipeline, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols for open scientific research. Through this comprehensive release, we identify the key ingredients for building a top-tier code LLM: (1) code optimized heuristic rules for data cleaning and methods for data deduplication, (2) recall of text corpus related to code and (3) high-quality synthetic data in both annealing and supervised fine-tuning stages. By offering this level of openness, we aim to broaden access to all aspects of a top-tier code LLM, with OpenCoder serving as both a powerful model and an open foundation to accelerate research, and enable reproducible advancements in code AI.

  • 19 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024 6

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

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.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 29, 2024

Closing the gap between open-source and commercial large language models for medical evidence summarization

Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise in summarizing medical evidence. Most recent studies focus on the application of proprietary LLMs. Using proprietary LLMs introduces multiple risk factors, including a lack of transparency and vendor dependency. While open-source LLMs allow better transparency and customization, their performance falls short compared to proprietary ones. In this study, we investigated to what extent fine-tuning open-source LLMs can further improve their performance in summarizing medical evidence. Utilizing a benchmark dataset, MedReview, consisting of 8,161 pairs of systematic reviews and summaries, we fine-tuned three broadly-used, open-sourced LLMs, namely PRIMERA, LongT5, and Llama-2. Overall, the fine-tuned LLMs obtained an increase of 9.89 in ROUGE-L (95% confidence interval: 8.94-10.81), 13.21 in METEOR score (95% confidence interval: 12.05-14.37), and 15.82 in CHRF score (95% confidence interval: 13.89-16.44). The performance of fine-tuned LongT5 is close to GPT-3.5 with zero-shot settings. Furthermore, smaller fine-tuned models sometimes even demonstrated superior performance compared to larger zero-shot models. The above trends of improvement were also manifested in both human and GPT4-simulated evaluations. Our results can be applied to guide model selection for tasks demanding particular domain knowledge, such as medical evidence summarization.

  • 14 authors
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Jul 25, 2024

Evaluation of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for supporting real-world information needs in healthcare delivery

Despite growing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in healthcare, current explorations do not assess the real-world utility and safety of LLMs in clinical settings. Our objective was to determine whether two LLMs can serve information needs submitted by physicians as questions to an informatics consultation service in a safe and concordant manner. Sixty six questions from an informatics consult service were submitted to GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 via simple prompts. 12 physicians assessed the LLM responses' possibility of patient harm and concordance with existing reports from an informatics consultation service. Physician assessments were summarized based on majority vote. For no questions did a majority of physicians deem either LLM response as harmful. For GPT-3.5, responses to 8 questions were concordant with the informatics consult report, 20 discordant, and 9 were unable to be assessed. There were 29 responses with no majority on "Agree", "Disagree", and "Unable to assess". For GPT-4, responses to 13 questions were concordant, 15 discordant, and 3 were unable to be assessed. There were 35 responses with no majority. Responses from both LLMs were largely devoid of overt harm, but less than 20% of the responses agreed with an answer from an informatics consultation service, responses contained hallucinated references, and physicians were divided on what constitutes harm. These results suggest that while general purpose LLMs are able to provide safe and credible responses, they often do not meet the specific information need of a given question. A definitive evaluation of the usefulness of LLMs in healthcare settings will likely require additional research on prompt engineering, calibration, and custom-tailoring of general purpose models.

  • 18 authors
·
Apr 26, 2023

EPO: Explicit Policy Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities in well-defined problems with clear solutions, such as mathematics and coding. However, they still struggle with complex real-world scenarios like business negotiations, which require strategic reasoning-an ability to navigate dynamic environments and align long-term goals amidst uncertainty. Existing methods for strategic reasoning face challenges in adaptability, scalability, and transferring strategies to new contexts. To address these issues, we propose explicit policy optimization (EPO) for strategic reasoning, featuring an LLM that provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior. To improve adaptability and policy transferability, we train the strategic reasoning model via multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) using process rewards and iterative self-play, without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step. Experiments across social and physical domains demonstrate EPO's ability of long-term goal alignment through enhanced strategic reasoning, achieving state-of-the-art performance on social dialogue and web navigation tasks. Our findings reveal various collaborative reasoning mechanisms emergent in EPO and its effectiveness in generating novel strategies, underscoring its potential for strategic reasoning in real-world applications.

  • 9 authors
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Feb 17

LLM-MedQA: Enhancing Medical Question Answering through Case Studies in Large Language Models

Accurate and efficient question-answering systems are essential for delivering high-quality patient care in the medical field. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides across various domains, they continue to face significant challenges in medical question answering, particularly in understanding domain-specific terminologies and performing complex reasoning. These limitations undermine their effectiveness in critical medical applications. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach incorporating similar case generation within a multi-agent medical question-answering (MedQA) system. Specifically, we leverage the Llama3.1:70B model, a state-of-the-art LLM, in a multi-agent architecture to enhance performance on the MedQA dataset using zero-shot learning. Our method capitalizes on the model's inherent medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities, eliminating the need for additional training data. Experimental results show substantial performance gains over existing benchmark models, with improvements of 7% in both accuracy and F1-score across various medical QA tasks. Furthermore, we examine the model's interpretability and reliability in addressing complex medical queries. This research not only offers a robust solution for medical question answering but also establishes a foundation for broader applications of LLMs in the medical domain.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 31, 2024

Large Language Model Distilling Medication Recommendation Model

The recommendation of medication is a vital aspect of intelligent healthcare systems, as it involves prescribing the most suitable drugs based on a patient's specific health needs. Unfortunately, many sophisticated models currently in use tend to overlook the nuanced semantics of medical data, while only relying heavily on identities. Furthermore, these models face significant challenges in handling cases involving patients who are visiting the hospital for the first time, as they lack prior prescription histories to draw upon. To tackle these issues, we harness the powerful semantic comprehension and input-agnostic characteristics of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our research aims to transform existing medication recommendation methodologies using LLMs. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Large Language Model Distilling Medication Recommendation (LEADER). We begin by creating appropriate prompt templates that enable LLMs to suggest medications effectively. However, the straightforward integration of LLMs into recommender systems leads to an out-of-corpus issue specific to drugs. We handle it by adapting the LLMs with a novel output layer and a refined tuning loss function. Although LLM-based models exhibit remarkable capabilities, they are plagued by high computational costs during inference, which is impractical for the healthcare sector. To mitigate this, we have developed a feature-level knowledge distillation technique, which transfers the LLM's proficiency to a more compact model. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets, MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV, demonstrate that our proposed model not only delivers effective results but also is efficient. To ease the reproducibility of our experiments, we release the implementation code online.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

Demystifying Large Language Models for Medicine: A Primer

Large language models (LLMs) represent a transformative class of AI tools capable of revolutionizing various aspects of healthcare by generating human-like responses across diverse contexts and adapting to novel tasks following human instructions. Their potential application spans a broad range of medical tasks, such as clinical documentation, matching patients to clinical trials, and answering medical questions. In this primer paper, we propose an actionable guideline to help healthcare professionals more efficiently utilize LLMs in their work, along with a set of best practices. This approach consists of several main phases, including formulating the task, choosing LLMs, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and deployment. We start with the discussion of critical considerations in identifying healthcare tasks that align with the core capabilities of LLMs and selecting models based on the selected task and data, performance requirements, and model interface. We then review the strategies, such as prompt engineering and fine-tuning, to adapt standard LLMs to specialized medical tasks. Deployment considerations, including regulatory compliance, ethical guidelines, and continuous monitoring for fairness and bias, are also discussed. By providing a structured step-by-step methodology, this tutorial aims to equip healthcare professionals with the tools necessary to effectively integrate LLMs into clinical practice, ensuring that these powerful technologies are applied in a safe, reliable, and impactful manner.

  • 23 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024

The Open Source Advantage in Large Language Models (LLMs)

Large language models (LLMs) mark a key shift in natural language processing (NLP), having advanced text generation, translation, and domain-specific reasoning. Closed-source models like GPT-4, powered by proprietary datasets and extensive computational resources, lead with state-of-the-art performance today. However, they face criticism for their "black box" nature and for limiting accessibility in a manner that hinders reproducibility and equitable AI development. By contrast, open-source initiatives like LLaMA and BLOOM prioritize democratization through community-driven development and computational efficiency. These models have significantly reduced performance gaps, particularly in linguistic diversity and domain-specific applications, while providing accessible tools for global researchers and developers. Notably, both paradigms rely on foundational architectural innovations, such as the Transformer framework by Vaswani et al. (2017). Closed-source models excel by scaling effectively, while open-source models adapt to real-world applications in underrepresented languages and domains. Techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and instruction-tuning datasets enable open-source models to achieve competitive results despite limited resources. To be sure, the tension between closed-source and open-source approaches underscores a broader debate on transparency versus proprietary control in AI. Ethical considerations further highlight this divide. Closed-source systems restrict external scrutiny, while open-source models promote reproducibility and collaboration but lack standardized auditing documentation frameworks to mitigate biases. Hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of both paradigms are likely to shape the future of LLM innovation, ensuring accessibility, competitive technical performance, and ethical deployment.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024 2

BRIDGE: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Understanding Real-world Clinical Practice Text

Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise for medical applications and are evolving rapidly, with new models being released at an accelerated pace. However, current evaluations of LLMs in clinical contexts remain limited. Most existing benchmarks rely on medical exam-style questions or PubMed-derived text, failing to capture the complexity of real-world electronic health record (EHR) data. Others focus narrowly on specific application scenarios, limiting their generalizability across broader clinical use. To address this gap, we present BRIDGE, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark comprising 87 tasks sourced from real-world clinical data sources across nine languages. We systematically evaluated 52 state-of-the-art LLMs (including DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o, Gemini, and Llama 4) under various inference strategies. With a total of 13,572 experiments, our results reveal substantial performance variation across model sizes, languages, natural language processing tasks, and clinical specialties. Notably, we demonstrate that open-source LLMs can achieve performance comparable to proprietary models, while medically fine-tuned LLMs based on older architectures often underperform versus updated general-purpose models. The BRIDGE and its corresponding leaderboard serve as a foundational resource and a unique reference for the development and evaluation of new LLMs in real-world clinical text understanding.

  • 17 authors
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Apr 28

The Ethics of ChatGPT in Medicine and Healthcare: A Systematic Review on Large Language Models (LLMs)

With the introduction of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have received enormous attention in healthcare. Despite their potential benefits, researchers have underscored various ethical implications. While individual instances have drawn much attention, the debate lacks a systematic overview of practical applications currently researched and ethical issues connected to them. Against this background, this work aims to map the ethical landscape surrounding the current stage of deployment of LLMs in medicine and healthcare. Electronic databases and preprint servers were queried using a comprehensive search strategy. Studies were screened and extracted following a modified rapid review approach. Methodological quality was assessed using a hybrid approach. For 53 records, a meta-aggregative synthesis was performed. Four fields of applications emerged and testify to a vivid exploration phase. Advantages of using LLMs are attributed to their capacity in data analysis, personalized information provisioning, support in decision-making, mitigating information loss and enhancing information accessibility. However, we also identifies recurrent ethical concerns connected to fairness, bias, non-maleficence, transparency, and privacy. A distinctive concern is the tendency to produce harmful misinformation or convincingly but inaccurate content. A recurrent plea for ethical guidance and human oversight is evident. Given the variety of use cases, it is suggested that the ethical guidance debate be reframed to focus on defining what constitutes acceptable human oversight across the spectrum of applications. This involves considering diverse settings, varying potentials for harm, and different acceptable thresholds for performance and certainty in healthcare. In addition, a critical inquiry is necessary to determine the extent to which the current experimental use of LLMs is necessary and justified.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024

MIRIAD: Augmenting LLMs with millions of medical query-response pairs

LLMs are bound to transform healthcare with advanced decision support and flexible chat assistants. However, LLMs are prone to generate inaccurate medical content. To ground LLMs in high-quality medical knowledge, LLMs have been equipped with external knowledge via RAG, where unstructured medical knowledge is split into small text chunks that can be selectively retrieved and integrated into the LLMs context. Yet, existing RAG pipelines rely on raw, unstructured medical text, which can be noisy, uncurated and difficult for LLMs to effectively leverage. Systematic approaches to organize medical knowledge to best surface it to LLMs are generally lacking. To address these challenges, we introduce MIRIAD, a large-scale, curated corpus of 5,821,948 medical QA pairs, each rephrased from and grounded in a passage from peer-reviewed medical literature using a semi-automated pipeline combining LLM generation, filtering, grounding, and human annotation. Unlike prior medical corpora, which rely on unstructured text, MIRIAD encapsulates web-scale medical knowledge in an operationalized query-response format, which enables more targeted retrieval. Experiments on challenging medical QA benchmarks show that augmenting LLMs with MIRIAD improves accuracy up to 6.7% compared to unstructured RAG baselines with the same source corpus and with the same amount of retrieved text. Moreover, MIRIAD improved the ability of LLMs to detect medical hallucinations by 22.5 to 37% (increase in F1 score). We further introduce MIRIAD-Atlas, an interactive map of MIRIAD spanning 56 medical disciplines, enabling clinical users to visually explore, search, and refine medical knowledge. MIRIAD promises to unlock a wealth of down-stream applications, including medical information retrievers, enhanced RAG applications, and knowledge-grounded chat interfaces, which ultimately enables more reliable LLM applications in healthcare.

Language Models And A Second Opinion Use Case: The Pocket Professional

This research tests the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) as formal second opinion tools in professional decision-making, particularly focusing on complex medical cases where even experienced physicians seek peer consultation. The work analyzed 183 challenging medical cases from Medscape over a 20-month period, testing multiple LLMs' performance against crowd-sourced physician responses. A key finding was the high overall score possible in the latest foundational models (>80% accuracy compared to consensus opinion), which exceeds most human metrics reported on the same clinical cases (450 pages of patient profiles, test results). The study rates the LLMs' performance disparity between straightforward cases (>81% accuracy) and complex scenarios (43% accuracy), particularly in these cases generating substantial debate among human physicians. The research demonstrates that LLMs may be valuable as generators of comprehensive differential diagnoses rather than as primary diagnostic tools, potentially helping to counter cognitive biases in clinical decision-making, reduce cognitive loads, and thus remove some sources of medical error. The inclusion of a second comparative legal dataset (Supreme Court cases, N=21) provides added empirical context to the AI use to foster second opinions, though these legal challenges proved considerably easier for LLMs to analyze. In addition to the original contributions of empirical evidence for LLM accuracy, the research aggregated a novel benchmark for others to score highly contested question and answer reliability between both LLMs and disagreeing human practitioners. These results suggest that the optimal deployment of LLMs in professional settings may differ substantially from current approaches that emphasize automation of routine tasks.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 27, 2024 2

Large language models in healthcare and medical domain: A review

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) within the healthcare sector has sparked both enthusiasm and apprehension. These models exhibit the remarkable capability to provide proficient responses to free-text queries, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of professional medical knowledge. This comprehensive survey delves into the functionalities of existing LLMs designed for healthcare applications, elucidating the trajectory of their development, starting from traditional Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to the present state of LLMs in healthcare sector. First, we explore the potential of LLMs to amplify the efficiency and effectiveness of diverse healthcare applications, particularly focusing on clinical language understanding tasks. These tasks encompass a wide spectrum, ranging from named entity recognition and relation extraction to natural language inference, multi-modal medical applications, document classification, and question-answering. Additionally, we conduct an extensive comparison of the most recent state-of-the-art LLMs in the healthcare domain, while also assessing the utilization of various open-source LLMs and highlighting their significance in healthcare applications. Furthermore, we present the essential performance metrics employed to evaluate LLMs in the biomedical domain, shedding light on their effectiveness and limitations. Finally, we summarize the prominent challenges and constraints faced by large language models in the healthcare sector, offering a holistic perspective on their potential benefits and shortcomings. This review provides a comprehensive exploration of the current landscape of LLMs in healthcare, addressing their role in transforming medical applications and the areas that warrant further research and development.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 12, 2023

Are Large Language Models True Healthcare Jacks-of-All-Trades? Benchmarking Across Health Professions Beyond Physician Exams

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in delivering accurate answers to questions about world knowledge. Despite this, existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs in healthcare predominantly focus on medical doctors, leaving other critical healthcare professions underrepresented. To fill this research gap, we introduce the Examinations for Medical Personnel in Chinese (EMPEC), a pioneering large-scale healthcare knowledge benchmark in traditional Chinese. EMPEC consists of 157,803 exam questions across 124 subjects and 20 healthcare professions, including underrepresented occupations like Optometrists and Audiologists. Each question is tagged with its release time and source, ensuring relevance and authenticity. We conducted extensive experiments on 17 LLMs, including proprietary, open-source models, general domain models and medical specific models, evaluating their performance under various settings. Our findings reveal that while leading models like GPT-4 achieve over 75\% accuracy, they still struggle with specialized fields and alternative medicine. Surprisingly, general-purpose LLMs outperformed medical-specific models, and incorporating EMPEC's training data significantly enhanced performance. Additionally, the results on questions released after the models' training cutoff date were consistent with overall performance trends, suggesting that the models' performance on the test set can predict their effectiveness in addressing unseen healthcare-related queries. The transition from traditional to simplified Chinese characters had a negligible impact on model performance, indicating robust linguistic versatility. Our study underscores the importance of expanding benchmarks to cover a broader range of healthcare professions to better assess the applicability of LLMs in real-world healthcare scenarios.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

A Survey of LLM times DATA

The integration of large language model (LLM) and data management (DATA) is rapidly redefining both domains. In this survey, we comprehensively review the bidirectional relationships. On the one hand, DATA4LLM, spanning large-scale data processing, storage, and serving, feeds LLMs with high quality, diversity, and timeliness of data required for stages like pre-training, post-training, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflows: (i) Data processing for LLMs includes scalable acquisition, deduplication, filtering, selection, domain mixing, and synthetic augmentation; (ii) Data Storage for LLMs focuses on efficient data and model formats, distributed and heterogeneous storage hierarchies, KV-cache management, and fault-tolerant checkpointing; (iii) Data serving for LLMs tackles challenges in RAG (e.g., knowledge post-processing), LLM inference (e.g., prompt compression, data provenance), and training strategies (e.g., data packing and shuffling). On the other hand, in LLM4DATA, LLMs are emerging as general-purpose engines for data management. We review recent advances in (i) data manipulation, including automatic data cleaning, integration, discovery; (ii) data analysis, covering reasoning over structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and (iii) system optimization (e.g., configuration tuning, query rewriting, anomaly diagnosis), powered by LLM techniques like retrieval-augmented prompting, task-specialized fine-tuning, and multi-agent collaboration.

  • 17 authors
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May 23

D-NLP at SemEval-2024 Task 2: Evaluating Clinical Inference Capabilities of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention and widespread usage due to their impressive performance in various tasks. However, they are not without their own set of challenges, including issues such as hallucinations, factual inconsistencies, and limitations in numerical-quantitative reasoning. Evaluating LLMs in miscellaneous reasoning tasks remains an active area of research. Prior to the breakthrough of LLMs, Transformers had already proven successful in the medical domain, effectively employed for various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Following this trend, LLMs have also been trained and utilized in the medical domain, raising concerns regarding factual accuracy, adherence to safety protocols, and inherent limitations. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the natural language inference capabilities of popular open-source and closed-source LLMs using clinical trial reports as the dataset. We present the performance results of each LLM and further analyze their performance on a development set, particularly focusing on challenging instances that involve medical abbreviations and require numerical-quantitative reasoning. Gemini, our leading LLM, achieved a test set F1-score of 0.748, securing the ninth position on the task scoreboard. Our work is the first of its kind, offering a thorough examination of the inference capabilities of LLMs within the medical domain.

  • 1 authors
·
May 7, 2024

MeNTi: Bridging Medical Calculator and LLM Agent with Nested Tool Calling

Integrating tools into Large Language Models (LLMs) has facilitated the widespread application. Despite this, in specialized downstream task contexts, reliance solely on tools is insufficient to fully address the complexities of the real world. This particularly restricts the effective deployment of LLMs in fields such as medicine. In this paper, we focus on the downstream tasks of medical calculators, which use standardized tests to assess an individual's health status. We introduce MeNTi, a universal agent architecture for LLMs. MeNTi integrates a specialized medical toolkit and employs meta-tool and nested calling mechanisms to enhance LLM tool utilization. Specifically, it achieves flexible tool selection and nested tool calling to address practical issues faced in intricate medical scenarios, including calculator selection, slot filling, and unit conversion. To assess the capabilities of LLMs for quantitative assessment throughout the clinical process of calculator scenarios, we introduce CalcQA. This benchmark requires LLMs to use medical calculators to perform calculations and assess patient health status. CalcQA is constructed by professional physicians and includes 100 case-calculator pairs, complemented by a toolkit of 281 medical tools. The experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements with our framework. This research paves new directions for applying LLMs in demanding scenarios of medicine.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 17, 2024

Hippocrates: An Open-Source Framework for Advancing Large Language Models in Healthcare

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into healthcare promises to transform medical diagnostics, research, and patient care. Yet, the progression of medical LLMs faces obstacles such as complex training requirements, rigorous evaluation demands, and the dominance of proprietary models that restrict academic exploration. Transparent, comprehensive access to LLM resources is essential for advancing the field, fostering reproducibility, and encouraging innovation in healthcare AI. We present Hippocrates, an open-source LLM framework specifically developed for the medical domain. In stark contrast to previous efforts, it offers unrestricted access to its training datasets, codebase, checkpoints, and evaluation protocols. This open approach is designed to stimulate collaborative research, allowing the community to build upon, refine, and rigorously evaluate medical LLMs within a transparent ecosystem. Also, we introduce Hippo, a family of 7B models tailored for the medical domain, fine-tuned from Mistral and LLaMA2 through continual pre-training, instruction tuning, and reinforcement learning from human and AI feedback. Our models outperform existing open medical LLMs models by a large-margin, even surpassing models with 70B parameters. Through Hippocrates, we aspire to unlock the full potential of LLMs not just to advance medical knowledge and patient care but also to democratize the benefits of AI research in healthcare, making them available across the globe.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 25, 2024

Polish Medical Exams: A new dataset for cross-lingual medical knowledge transfer assessment

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in handling specialized tasks, including medical problem-solving. However, most studies predominantly focus on English-language contexts. This study introduces a novel benchmark dataset based on Polish medical licensing and specialization exams (LEK, LDEK, PES) taken by medical doctor candidates and practicing doctors pursuing specialization. The dataset was web-scraped from publicly available resources provided by the Medical Examination Center and the Chief Medical Chamber. It comprises over 24,000 exam questions, including a subset of parallel Polish-English corpora, where the English portion was professionally translated by the examination center for foreign candidates. By creating a structured benchmark from these existing exam questions, we systematically evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs, including general-purpose, domain-specific, and Polish-specific models, and compare their performance against human medical students. Our analysis reveals that while models like GPT-4o achieve near-human performance, significant challenges persist in cross-lingual translation and domain-specific understanding. These findings underscore disparities in model performance across languages and medical specialties, highlighting the limitations and ethical considerations of deploying LLMs in clinical practice.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 30, 2024

A Survey on Medical Large Language Models: Technology, Application, Trustworthiness, and Future Directions

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), medical artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced substantial technological progress and paradigm shifts, highlighting the potential of LLMs to streamline healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes. Considering this rapid technical progress, in this survey, we trace the recent advances of Medical Large Language Models (Med-LLMs), including the background, key findings, and mainstream techniques, especially for the evolution from general-purpose models to medical-specialized applications. Firstly, we delve into the foundational technology of Med-LLMs, indicating how general models can be progressively adapted and refined for the complicated medical tasks. Secondly, the wide-ranging applications of Med-LLMs are investigated across various healthcare domains, as well as an up-to-date review of existing Med-LLMs. The transformative impact of these models on daily medical practice is evident through their ability to assist clinicians, educators, and patients. Recognizing the importance of responsible innovation, we discuss the challenges associated with ensuring fairness, accountability, privacy, and robustness. Ethical considerations, rigorous evaluation methodologies, and the establishment of regulatory frameworks are crucial for building trustworthiness in the real-world system. We emphasize the need for ongoing scrutiny and development to maintain high standards of safety and reliability. Finally, we anticipate possible future trajectories for Med-LLMs, identifying key avenues for prudent expansion. By consolidating these insights, our review aims to provide professionals and researchers with a thorough understanding of the strengths and limitations of Med-LLMs, fostering a balanced and ethical approach to their integration into the healthcare ecosystem.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 5, 2024

Towards Accurate Differential Diagnosis with Large Language Models

An accurate differential diagnosis (DDx) is a cornerstone of medical care, often reached through an iterative process of interpretation that combines clinical history, physical examination, investigations and procedures. Interactive interfaces powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to both assist and automate aspects of this process. In this study, we introduce an LLM optimized for diagnostic reasoning, and evaluate its ability to generate a DDx alone or as an aid to clinicians. 20 clinicians evaluated 302 challenging, real-world medical cases sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) case reports. Each case report was read by two clinicians, who were randomized to one of two assistive conditions: either assistance from search engines and standard medical resources, or LLM assistance in addition to these tools. All clinicians provided a baseline, unassisted DDx prior to using the respective assistive tools. Our LLM for DDx exhibited standalone performance that exceeded that of unassisted clinicians (top-10 accuracy 59.1% vs 33.6%, [p = 0.04]). Comparing the two assisted study arms, the DDx quality score was higher for clinicians assisted by our LLM (top-10 accuracy 51.7%) compared to clinicians without its assistance (36.1%) (McNemar's Test: 45.7, p < 0.01) and clinicians with search (44.4%) (4.75, p = 0.03). Further, clinicians assisted by our LLM arrived at more comprehensive differential lists than those without its assistance. Our study suggests that our LLM for DDx has potential to improve clinicians' diagnostic reasoning and accuracy in challenging cases, meriting further real-world evaluation for its ability to empower physicians and widen patients' access to specialist-level expertise.

  • 28 authors
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Nov 30, 2023 1

BLADE: Enhancing Black-box Large Language Models with Small Domain-Specific Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are versatile and capable of addressing a diverse range of tasks. However, general LLMs, which are developed on open-domain data, may lack the domain-specific knowledge essential for tasks in vertical domains, such as legal, medical, etc. To address this issue, previous approaches either conduct continuous pre-training with domain-specific data or employ retrieval augmentation to support general LLMs. Unfortunately, these strategies are either cost-intensive or unreliable in practical applications. To this end, we present a novel framework named BLADE, which enhances Black-box LArge language models with small Domain-spEcific models. BLADE consists of a black-box LLM and a small domain-specific LM. The small LM preserves domain-specific knowledge and offers specialized insights, while the general LLM contributes robust language comprehension and reasoning capabilities. Specifically, our method involves three steps: 1) pre-training the small LM with domain-specific data, 2) fine-tuning this model using knowledge instruction data, and 3) joint Bayesian optimization of the general LLM and the small LM. Extensive experiments conducted on public legal and medical benchmarks reveal that BLADE significantly outperforms existing approaches. This shows the potential of BLADE as an effective and cost-efficient solution in adapting general LLMs for vertical domains.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 27, 2024

Preference Learning Unlocks LLMs' Psycho-Counseling Skills

Applying large language models (LLMs) to assist in psycho-counseling is an emerging and meaningful approach, driven by the significant gap between patient needs and the availability of mental health support. However, current LLMs struggle to consistently provide effective responses to client speeches, largely due to the lack of supervision from high-quality real psycho-counseling data, whose content is typically inaccessible due to client privacy concerns. Furthermore, the quality of therapists' responses in available sessions can vary significantly based on their professional training and experience. Assessing the quality of therapists' responses remains an open challenge. In this work, we address these challenges by first proposing a set of professional and comprehensive principles to evaluate therapists' responses to client speeches. Using these principles, we create a preference dataset, PsychoCounsel-Preference, which contains 36k high-quality preference comparison pairs. This dataset aligns with the preferences of professional psychotherapists, providing a robust foundation for evaluating and improving LLMs in psycho-counseling. Experiments on reward modeling and preference learning demonstrate that PsychoCounsel-Preference is an excellent resource for LLMs to acquire essential skills for responding to clients in a counseling session. Our best-aligned model, PsychoCounsel-Llama3-8B, achieves an impressive win rate of 87% against GPT-4o. We release PsychoCounsel-Preference, PsychoCounsel-Llama3-8B and the reward model PsychoCounsel Llama3-8B-Reward to facilitate the research of psycho-counseling with LLMs at: https://hf.co/Psychotherapy-LLM.

  • 3 authors
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Feb 26 2