Training Small Multimodal Models to Bridge Biomedical Competency Gap: A Case Study in Radiology Imaging

The scaling laws and extraordinary performance of large foundation models motivate the development and utilization of such large models in biomedicine. However, despite early promising results on some biomedical benchmarks, there are still major challenges that need to be addressed before these models can be used in real-world applications. Frontier models such as GPT-4V still have major competency gaps in multimodal capabilities for biomedical applications. Moreover, pragmatic issues such as access, cost, latency, and compliance make it hard for clinicians to use privately-hosted state-of-the-art large models directly on private patient data. In this paper, we explore training open-source small multimodal models (SMMs) to bridge biomedical competency gaps for unmet clinical needs. To maximize data efficiency, we adopt a modular approach by incorporating state-of-the-art pre-trained models for image and text modalities, and focusing on training a lightweight adapter to ground each modality to the text embedding space. We conduct a comprehensive study of this approach on radiology imaging. For training, we assemble a large dataset with over 1 million image-text pairs. For evaluation, we propose a clinically driven novel approach using GPT-4 and demonstrate its parity with expert evaluation. We also study grounding qualitatively using attention. For best practice, we conduct a systematic ablation study on various choices in data engineering and multimodal training. The resulting LLaVA-Rad (7B) model attains state-of-the-art results on radiology tasks such as report generation and cross-modal retrieval, even outperforming much larger models such as GPT-4V and Med-PaLM M (84B). LLaVA-Rad is fast and can be run on a single V100 GPU in private settings, offering a promising state-of-the-art tool for real-world clinical applications.

SciAgent: Tool-augmented Language Models for Scientific Reasoning

Scientific reasoning poses an excessive challenge for even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). To make this task more practical and solvable for LLMs, we introduce a new task setting named tool-augmented scientific reasoning. This setting supplements LLMs with scalable toolsets, and shifts the focus from pursuing an omniscient problem solver to a proficient tool-user. To facilitate the research of such setting, we construct a tool-augmented training corpus named MathFunc which encompasses over 30,000 samples and roughly 6,000 tools. Building on MathFunc, we develop SciAgent to retrieve, understand and, if necessary, use tools for scientific problem solving. Additionally, we craft a benchmark, SciToolBench, spanning five scientific domains to evaluate LLMs' abilities with tool assistance. Extensive experiments on SciToolBench confirm the effectiveness of SciAgent. Notably, SciAgent-Mistral-7B surpasses other LLMs with the same size by more than 13% in absolute accuracy. Furthermore, SciAgent-DeepMath-7B shows much superior performance than ChatGPT.