MING-MOE: Enhancing Medical Multi-Task Learning in Large Language Models with Sparse Mixture of Low-Rank Adapter Experts

Large language models like ChatGPT have shown substantial progress in natural language understanding and generation, proving valuable across various disciplines, including the medical field. Despite advancements, challenges persist due to the complexity and diversity inherent in medical tasks which often require multi-task learning capabilities. Previous approaches, although beneficial, fall short in real-world applications because they necessitate task-specific annotations at inference time, limiting broader generalization. This paper introduces MING-MOE, a novel Mixture-of-Expert~(MOE)-based medical large language model designed to manage diverse and complex medical tasks without requiring task-specific annotations, thus enhancing its usability across extensive datasets. MING-MOE employs a Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation (MoLoRA) technique, allowing for efficient parameter usage by maintaining base model parameters static while adapting through a minimal set of trainable parameters. We demonstrate that MING-MOE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on over 20 medical tasks, illustrating a significant improvement over existing models. This approach not only extends the capabilities of medical language models but also improves inference efficiency.

Automatic Interactive Evaluation for Large Language Models with State Aware Patient Simulator

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in human interactions, yet their application within the medical field remains insufficiently explored. Previous works mainly focus on the performance of medical knowledge with examinations, which is far from the realistic scenarios, falling short in assessing the abilities of LLMs on clinical tasks. In the quest to enhance the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare, this paper introduces the Automated Interactive Evaluation (AIE) framework and the State-Aware Patient Simulator (SAPS), targeting the gap between traditional LLM evaluations and the nuanced demands of clinical practice. Unlike prior methods that rely on static medical knowledge assessments, AIE and SAPS provide a dynamic, realistic platform for assessing LLMs through multi-turn doctor-patient simulations. This approach offers a closer approximation to real clinical scenarios and allows for a detailed analysis of LLM behaviors in response to complex patient interactions. Our extensive experimental validation demonstrates the effectiveness of the AIE framework, with outcomes that align well with human evaluations, underscoring its potential to revolutionize medical LLM testing for improved healthcare delivery.

Leveraging Diverse Modeling Contexts with Collaborating Learning for Neural Machine Translation

Autoregressive (AR) and Non-autoregressive (NAR) models are two types of generative models for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). AR models predict tokens in a word-by-word manner and can effectively capture the distribution of real translations. NAR models predict tokens by extracting bidirectional contextual information which can improve the inference speed but they suffer from performance degradation. Previous works utilized AR models to enhance NAR models by reducing the training data's complexity or incorporating the global information into AR models by virtue of NAR models. However, those investigated methods only take advantage of the contextual information of a single type of model while neglecting the diversity in the contextual information that can be provided by different types of models. In this paper, we propose a novel generic collaborative learning method, DCMCL, where AR and NAR models are treated as collaborators instead of teachers and students. To hierarchically leverage the bilateral contextual information, token-level mutual learning and sequence-level contrastive learning are adopted between AR and NAR models. Extensive experiments on four widely used benchmarks show that the proposed DCMCL method can simultaneously improve both AR and NAR models with up to 1.38 and 2.98 BLEU scores respectively, and can also outperform the current best-unified model with up to 0.97 BLEU scores for both AR and NAR decoding.

MM-SAP: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Assessing Self-Awareness of Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown their remarkable abilities in visual perception and understanding recently. However, how to comprehensively evaluate the capabilities of MLLMs remains a challenge. Most of the existing benchmarks predominantly focus on assessing perception, cognition, and reasoning, neglecting the abilities of self-awareness, referring to the model's recognition of its own capability boundary. In our study, we focus on self-awareness in image perception and introduce the knowledge quadrant for MLLMs, which clearly defines the knowns and unknowns in perception. Based on this, we propose a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the Self-Aware capabilities in Perception for MLLMs(MM-SAP). MM-SAP encompasses three distinct sub-datasets, each focusing on different aspects of self-awareness. We evaluated eight well-known MLLMs using MM-SAP, analyzing their self-awareness and providing detailed insights. Code and data are available at https://github.com/YHWmz/MM-SAP

An Automatic Evaluation Framework for Multi-turn Medical Consultations Capabilities of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in interacting with human. However, recent studies have revealed that these models often suffer from hallucinations, leading to overly confident but incorrect judgments. This limits their application in the medical domain, where tasks require the utmost accuracy. This paper introduces an automated evaluation framework that assesses the practical capabilities of LLMs as virtual doctors during multi-turn consultations. Consultation tasks are designed to require LLMs to be aware of what they do not know, to inquire about missing medical information from patients, and to ultimately make diagnoses. To evaluate the performance of LLMs for these tasks, a benchmark is proposed by reformulating medical multiple-choice questions from the United States Medical Licensing Examinations (USMLE), and comprehensive evaluation metrics are developed and evaluated on three constructed test sets. A medical consultation training set is further constructed to improve the consultation ability of LLMs. The results of the experiments show that fine-tuning with the training set can alleviate hallucinations and improve LLMs' performance on the proposed benchmark. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework.

A translational pathway of deep learning methods in GastroIntestinal Endoscopy

The Endoscopy Computer Vision Challenge (EndoCV) is a crowd-sourcing initiative to address eminent problems in developing reliable computer aided detection and diagnosis endoscopy systems and suggest a pathway for clinical translation of technologies. Whilst endoscopy is a widely used diagnostic and treatment tool for hollow-organs, there are several core challenges often faced by endoscopists, mainly: 1) presence of multi-class artefacts that hinder their visual interpretation, and 2) difficulty in identifying subtle precancerous precursors and cancer abnormalities. Artefacts often affect the robustness of deep learning methods applied to the gastrointestinal tract organs as they can be confused with tissue of interest. EndoCV2020 challenges are designed to address research questions in these remits. In this paper, we present a summary of methods developed by the top 17 teams and provide an objective comparison of state-of-the-art methods and methods designed by the participants for two sub-challenges: i) artefact detection and segmentation (EAD2020), and ii) disease detection and segmentation (EDD2020). Multi-center, multi-organ, multi-class, and multi-modal clinical endoscopy datasets were compiled for both EAD2020 and EDD2020 sub-challenges. An out-of-sample generalisation ability of detection algorithms was also evaluated. Whilst most teams focused on accuracy improvements, only a few methods hold credibility for clinical usability. The best performing teams provided solutions to tackle class imbalance, and variabilities in size, origin, modality and occurrences by exploring data augmentation, data fusion, and optimal class thresholding techniques.