Small Language Models Learn Enhanced Reasoning Skills from Medical Textbooks

While recent advancements in commercial large language models (LM) have shown promising results in medical tasks, their closed-source nature poses significant privacy and security concerns, hindering their widespread use in the medical field. Despite efforts to create open-source models, their limited parameters often result in insufficient multi-step reasoning capabilities required for solving complex medical problems. To address this, we introduce Meerkat-7B, a novel medical AI system with 7 billion parameters. Meerkat-7B was trained using our new synthetic dataset consisting of high-quality chain-of-thought reasoning paths sourced from 18 medical textbooks, along with diverse instruction-following datasets. Our system achieved remarkable accuracy across seven medical benchmarks, surpassing GPT-3.5 by 13.1%, as well as outperforming the previous best 7B models such as MediTron-7B and BioMistral-7B by 13.4% and 9.8%, respectively. Notably, it surpassed the passing threshold of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) for the first time for a 7B-parameter model. Additionally, our system offered more detailed free-form responses to clinical queries compared to existing 7B and 13B models, approaching the performance level of GPT-3.5. This significantly narrows the performance gap with large LMs, showcasing its effectiveness in addressing complex medical challenges.

KitchenScale: Learning to predict ingredient quantities from recipe contexts

Determining proper quantities for ingredients is an essential part of cooking practice from the perspective of enriching tastiness and promoting healthiness. We introduce KitchenScale, a fine-tuned Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) that predicts a target ingredient's quantity and measurement unit given its recipe context. To effectively train our KitchenScale model, we formulate an ingredient quantity prediction task that consists of three sub-tasks which are ingredient measurement type classification, unit classification, and quantity regression task. Furthermore, we utilized transfer learning of cooking knowledge from recipe texts to PLMs. We adopted the Discrete Latent Exponent (DExp) method to cope with high variance of numerical scales in recipe corpora. Experiments with our newly constructed dataset and recommendation examples demonstrate KitchenScale's understanding of various recipe contexts and generalizability in predicting ingredient quantities. We implemented a web application for KitchenScale to demonstrate its functionality in recommending ingredient quantities expressed in numerals (e.g., 2) with units (e.g., ounce).

RecipeMind: Guiding Ingredient Choices from Food Pairing to Recipe Completion using Cascaded Set Transformer

We propose a computational approach for recipe ideation, a downstream task that helps users select and gather ingredients for creating dishes. To perform this task, we developed RecipeMind, a food affinity score prediction model that quantifies the suitability of adding an ingredient to set of other ingredients. We constructed a large-scale dataset containing ingredient co-occurrence based scores to train and evaluate RecipeMind on food affinity score prediction. Deployed in recipe ideation, RecipeMind helps the user expand an initial set of ingredients by suggesting additional ingredients. Experiments and qualitative analysis show RecipeMind's potential in fulfilling its assistive role in cuisine domain.

Learning User Preferences and Understanding Calendar Contexts for Event Scheduling

With online calendar services gaining popularity worldwide, calendar data has become one of the richest context sources for understanding human behavior. However, event scheduling is still time-consuming even with the development of online calendars. Although machine learning based event scheduling models have automated scheduling processes to some extent, they often fail to understand subtle user preferences and complex calendar contexts with event titles written in natural language. In this paper, we propose Neural Event Scheduling Assistant (NESA) which learns user preferences and understands calendar contexts, directly from raw online calendars for fully automated and highly effective event scheduling. We leverage over 593K calendar events for NESA to learn scheduling personal events, and we further utilize NESA for multi-attendee event scheduling. NESA successfully incorporates deep neural networks such as Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory, Convolutional Neural Network, and Highway Network for learning the preferences of each user and understanding calendar context based on natural languages. The experimental results show that NESA significantly outperforms previous baseline models in terms of various evaluation metrics on both personal and multi-attendee event scheduling tasks. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of each layer in NESA and learned user preferences.