Guangyu Wang

Guoxing Yang, Jianyu Shi, Zan Wang et al.

Pre-training and fine-tuning have emerged as a promising paradigm across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The effectiveness of pretrained large language models (LLM) has witnessed further enhancement, holding potential for applications in the field of medicine, particularly in the context of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). However, the application of these general models to specific domains often yields suboptimal results, primarily due to challenges like lack of domain knowledge, unique objectives, and computational efficiency. Furthermore, their effectiveness in specialized domains, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, requires comprehensive evaluation. To address the above issues, we propose a novel domain specific TCMDA (TCM Domain Adaptation) approach, efficient pre-training with domain-specific corpus. Specifically, we first construct a large TCM-specific corpus, TCM-Corpus-1B, by identifying domain keywords and retreving from general corpus. Then, our TCMDA leverages the LoRA which freezes the pretrained model's weights and uses rank decomposition matrices to efficiently train specific dense layers for pre-training and fine-tuning, efficiently aligning the model with TCM-related tasks, namely TCM-GPT-7B. We further conducted extensive experiments on two TCM tasks, including TCM examination and TCM diagnosis. TCM-GPT-7B archived the best performance across both datasets, outperforming other models by relative increments of 17% and 12% in accuracy, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, our study represents the pioneering validation of domain adaptation of a large language model with 7 billion parameters in TCM domain. We will release both TCMCorpus-1B and TCM-GPT-7B model once accepted to facilitate interdisciplinary development in TCM and NLP, serving as the foundation for further study.

Guangyu Wang, Guoxing Yang, Zongxin Du et al.

Large language models have exhibited exceptional performance on various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, leveraging techniques such as the pre-training, and instruction fine-tuning. Despite these advances, their effectiveness in medical applications is limited, due to challenges such as factual inaccuracies, reasoning abilities, and lack grounding in real-world experience. In this study, we present ClinicalGPT, a language model explicitly designed and optimized for clinical scenarios. By incorporating extensive and diverse real-world data, such as medical records, domain-specific knowledge, and multi-round dialogue consultations in the training process, ClinicalGPT is better prepared to handle multiple clinical task. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework that includes medical knowledge question-answering, medical exams, patient consultations, and diagnostic analysis of medical records. Our results demonstrate that ClinicalGPT significantly outperforms other models in these tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in adapting large language models to the critical domain of healthcare.

Yuhao Wang, Kai Wang, Xiaohong Liu et al.

Automated radiology report generation aims at automatically generating a detailed description of medical images, which can greatly alleviate the workload of radiologists and provide better medical services to remote areas. Most existing works pay attention to the holistic impression of medical images, failing to utilize important anatomy information. However, in actual clinical practice, radiologists usually locate important anatomical structures, and then look for signs of abnormalities in certain structures and reason the underlying disease. In this paper, we propose a novel framework AGFNet to dynamically fuse the global and anatomy region feature to generate multi-grained radiology report. Firstly, we extract important anatomy region features and global features of input Chest X-ray (CXR). Then, with the region features and the global features as input, our proposed self-adaptive fusion gate module could dynamically fuse multi-granularity information. Finally, the captioning generator generates the radiology reports through multi-granularity features. Experiment results illustrate that our model achieved the state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets including the IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR. Further analyses also prove that our model is able to leverage the multi-grained information from radiology images and texts so as to help generate more accurate reports.

Yuning Yang, Han Yu, Chuan Sun et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a collaborative machine learning paradigm for training models on local sensitive data with privacy protection. Pre-trained transformer-based models have emerged as useful foundation models (FMs) to be fine-tuned for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, large-scale pre-trained models make it challenging for traditional FL due to high communication overhead in the resource-constrained IoT. This has inspired the field of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) research. Existing PEFT methods attempt to optimize model performance at the given dropout level. Such an approach places the burden on human users to find a dropout rate that provides a satisfactory level of performance through trial-and-error, which is time consuming and resource intensive. To address this limitation, we propose the Step-wise Parameter Dropout for Continual Federated Learning (SPD-CFL) approach. Instead of pre-defining a desired dropout rate, it allows users to specify the target level of performance and then attempts to find the most suitable dropout rate for the given FL model. Specifically, on the server side, SPD-CFL drops trainable parameters in a stepwise manner to improve communication efficiency by reducing the rank of low-rank adaptation (LoRA). The sensitivity-based gradient consistency (SGC) measure is designed to facilitate the adaptive adjustment of parameter dropout. In addition, SPD-CFL introduces continual learning (CL) on the client side to mitigate performance degradation due to the inconsistent optima with distinct parameter dropout rates under heterogeneous FL. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark dataset CIFAR-10 and a real-world medical Face dataset demonstrate significant superiority of SPD-CFL over state-of-the-art methods. Compared to the best-performing baseline, it achieves a 2.07% higher test AUC while reducing communication overhead by 29.53%.