Linda Ruth Petzold

Xinlu Zhang, Chenxin Tian, Xianjun Yang et al.

Instruction-finetuning (IFT) has become crucial in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse human needs and has shown great potential in medical applications. However, previous studies mainly fine-tune LLMs on biomedical datasets with limited diversity, which often rely on benchmarks or narrow task scopes, and hence significantly limit the effectiveness on their medical instruction-following ability and generalizability. To bridge this gap, we propose creating a diverse, machine-generated medical IFT dataset, MedInstruct-52k, using GPT-4 and ChatGPT with a high-quality expert-curated seed set. We then fine-tune LLaMA-series models on the dataset to develop AlpaCare. Despite using a smaller domain-specific dataset than previous medical LLMs, AlpaCare not only demonstrates superior performance on medical applications, with up to 38.1% absolute gain over best baselines in medical free-form instruction evaluations, but also achieves 6.7% absolute gains averaged over multiple general domain benchmarks. Human evaluation further shows that AlpaCare consistently outperforms best baselines in terms of both correctness and helpfulness. We offer public access to our data, model, and codebase in https://github.com/XZhang97666/AlpaCare.

Zekun Li, Xianjun Yang, Kyuri Choi et al.

Scientific figure interpretation is a crucial capability for AI-driven scientific assistants built on advanced Large Vision Language Models. However, current datasets and benchmarks primarily focus on simple charts or other relatively straightforward figures from limited science domains. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive dataset compiled from peer-reviewed Nature Communications articles covering 72 scientific fields, encompassing complex visualizations such as schematic diagrams, microscopic images, and experimental data which require graduate-level expertise to interpret. We evaluated 19 proprietary and open-source models on two benchmark tasks, figure captioning and multiple-choice, and conducted human expert annotation. Our analysis revealed significant task challenges and performance gaps among models. Beyond serving as a benchmark, this dataset serves as a valuable resource for large-scale training. Fine-tuning Qwen2-VL-7B with our task-specific data achieved better performance than GPT-4o and even human experts in multiple-choice evaluations. Furthermore, continuous pre-training on our interleaved article and figure data substantially enhanced the model's downstream task performance in materials science. We have released our dataset to support further research.

Xinlu Zhang, Yujie Lu, Weizhi Wang et al.

Automatically evaluating vision-language tasks is challenging, especially when it comes to reflecting human judgments due to limitations in accounting for fine-grained details. Although GPT-4V has shown promising results in various multi-modal tasks, leveraging GPT-4V as a generalist evaluator for these tasks has not yet been systematically explored. We comprehensively validate GPT-4V's capabilities for evaluation purposes, addressing tasks ranging from foundational image-to-text and text-to-image synthesis to high-level image-to-image translations and multi-images to text alignment. We employ two evaluation methods, single-answer grading and pairwise comparison, using GPT-4V. Notably, GPT-4V shows promising agreement with humans across various tasks and evaluation methods, demonstrating immense potential for multi-modal LLMs as evaluators. Despite limitations like restricted visual clarity grading and real-world complex reasoning, its ability to provide human-aligned scores enriched with detailed explanations is promising for universal automatic evaluator.

Xinlu Zhang, Shiyang Li, Xianjun Yang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable medical expertise, but data privacy concerns impede their direct use in healthcare environments. Although offering improved data privacy protection, domain-specific small language models (SLMs) often underperform LLMs, emphasizing the need for methods that reduce this performance gap while alleviating privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method that harnesses LLMs' medical proficiency to boost SLM performance in medical tasks under privacy-restricted scenarios. Specifically, we mitigate patient privacy issues by extracting keywords from medical data and prompting the LLM to generate a medical knowledge-intensive context by simulating clinicians' thought processes. This context serves as additional input for SLMs, augmenting their decision-making capabilities. Our method significantly enhances performance in both few-shot and full training settings across three medical knowledge-intensive tasks, achieving up to a 22.57% increase in absolute accuracy compared to SLM fine-tuning without context, and sets new state-of-the-art results in two medical tasks within privacy-restricted scenarios. Further out-of-domain testing and experiments in two general domain datasets showcase its generalizability and broad applicability. Our code can be found at https://github.com/XZhang97666/PrivacyBoost-SLM.

Xianjun Yang, Liqiang Xiao, Shiyang Li et al.

Current jailbreaking work on large language models (LLMs) aims to elicit unsafe outputs from given prompts. However, it only focuses on single-turn jailbreaking targeting one specific query. On the contrary, the advanced LLMs are designed to handle extremely long contexts and can thus conduct multi-turn conversations. So, we propose exploring multi-turn jailbreaking, in which the jailbroken LLMs are continuously tested on more than the first-turn conversation or a single target query. This is an even more serious threat because 1) it is common for users to continue asking relevant follow-up questions to clarify certain jailbroken details, and 2) it is also possible that the initial round of jailbreaking causes the LLMs to respond to additional irrelevant questions consistently. As the first step (First draft done at June 2024) in exploring multi-turn jailbreaking, we construct a Multi-Turn Jailbreak Benchmark (MTJ-Bench) for benchmarking this setting on a series of open- and closed-source models and provide novel insights into this new safety threat. By revealing this new vulnerability, we aim to call for community efforts to build safer LLMs and pave the way for a more in-depth understanding of jailbreaking LLMs.