Xiaoming Shi

Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Chuan Wang et al.

Most medical dialogue systems assume that patients have clear goals (medicine querying, surgical operation querying, etc.) before medical consultation. However, in many real scenarios, due to the lack of medical knowledge, it is usually difficult for patients to determine clear goals with all necessary slots. In this paper, we identify this challenge as how to construct medical consultation dialogue systems to help patients clarify their goals. To mitigate this challenge, we propose a novel task and create a human-to-human mixed-type medical consultation dialogue corpus, termed MidMed, covering five dialogue types: task-oriented dialogue for diagnosis, recommendation, knowledge-grounded dialogue, QA, and chitchat. MidMed covers four departments (otorhinolaryngology, ophthalmology, skin, and digestive system), with 8,175 dialogues. Furthermore, we build baselines on MidMed and propose an instruction-guiding medical dialogue generation framework, termed InsMed, to address this task. Experimental results show the effectiveness of InsMed.

Kaitao Chen, Mianxin Liu, Fang Yan et al.

The advent of vision-language models fosters the interactive conversations between AI-enabled models and humans. Yet applying these models into clinics must deal with daunting challenges around large-scale training data, financial, and computational resources. Here we propose a cost-effective instruction learning framework for conversational pathology named as CLOVER. CLOVER only trains a lightweight module and uses instruction tuning while freezing the parameters of the large language model. Instead of using costly GPT-4, we propose well-designed prompts on GPT-3.5 for building generation-based instructions, emphasizing the utility of pathological knowledge derived from the Internet source. To augment the use of instructions, we construct a high-quality set of template-based instructions in the context of digital pathology. From two benchmark datasets, our findings reveal the strength of hybrid-form instructions in the visual question-answer in pathology. Extensive results show the cost-effectiveness of CLOVER in answering both open-ended and closed-ended questions, where CLOVER outperforms strong baselines that possess 37 times more training parameters and use instruction data generated from GPT-4. Through the instruction tuning, CLOVER exhibits robustness of few-shot learning in the external clinical dataset. These findings demonstrate that cost-effective modeling of CLOVER could accelerate the adoption of rapid conversational applications in the landscape of digital pathology.

Mengliang He, Jiayi Zeng, Yankai Jiang et al.

While large language models (LLMs) show promise in code generation, existing benchmarks neglect the flowchart-based code generation. To promote further research on flowchart-based code generation, this work presents Flow2Code, a novel benchmark for flowchart-based code generation evaluation. The evaluation dataset spans 15 programming languages and includes 5,622 code segments paired with 16,866 flowcharts of three types: code, UML, and pseudocode. Extensive experiments with 13 multimodal LLMs reveal that current LLMs can not generate code based on flowcharts perfectly. Besides, experiment results show that the supervised fine-tuning technique contributes greatly to the models' performance. We publicly release our code and datasets at https://github.com/hml-github/Flow2Code.

Binbin Li, Tianxin Meng, Xiaoming Shi et al.

It is becoming increasingly emphasis on the importance of LLM participating in clinical diagnosis decision-making. However, the low specialization refers to that current medical LLMs can not provide specific medical advice, which are more like a medical Q\&A. And there is no suitable clinical guidance tree data set that can be used directly with LLM. To address this issue, we first propose LLM-executavle clinical guidance tree(CGT), which can be directly used by large language models, and construct medical diagnostic decision-making dataset (MedDM), from flowcharts in clinical practice guidelines. We propose an approach to screen flowcharts from medical literature, followed by their identification and conversion into standardized diagnostic decision trees. Constructed a knowledge base with 1202 decision trees, which came from 5000 medical literature and covered 12 hospital departments, including internal medicine, surgery, psychiatry, and over 500 diseases.Moreover, we propose a method for reasoning on LLM-executable CGT and a Patient-LLM multi-turn dialogue framework.

Xiaodong Wu, Minhao Wang, Yichen Liu et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve in natural language processing (NLP), their ability to stably follow instructions in long-context inputs has become critical for real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks seldom focus on instruction-following in long-context scenarios or stability on different inputs. To bridge this gap, we introduce LIFBench, a scalable dataset designed to evaluate LLMs' instruction-following capabilities and stability across long contexts. LIFBench comprises three long-context scenarios and eleven diverse tasks, featuring 2,766 instructions generated through an automated expansion method across three dimensions: length, expression, and variables. For evaluation, we propose LIFEval, a rubric-based assessment method that enables precise, automated scoring of complex LLM responses without reliance on LLM-assisted assessments or human judgment. This method allows for a comprehensive analysis of model performance and stability from multiple perspectives. We conduct detailed experiments on 20 prominent LLMs across six length intervals. Our work contributes LIFBench and LIFEval as robust tools for assessing LLM performance in complex and long-context settings, offering valuable insights to guide future advancements in LLM development.

Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Li Du et al.

This paper surveys and organizes research works on medical dialog systems, which is an important yet challenging task. Although these systems have been surveyed in the medical community from an application perspective, a systematic review from a rigorous technical perspective has to date remained noticeably absent. As a result, an overview of the categories, methods, and evaluation of medical dialogue systems remain limited and underspecified, hindering the further improvement of this area. To fill this gap, we investigate an initial pool of 325 papers from well-known computer science, and natural language processing conferences and journals, and make an overview. Recently, large language models have shown strong model capacity on downstream tasks, which also reshaped medical dialog systems' foundation. Despite the alluring practical application value, current medical dialogue systems still suffer from problems. To this end, this paper lists the grand challenges of medical dialog systems, especially of large language models.

Honglin Mu, Han He, Yuxin Zhou et al.

Large language model (LLM) safety is a critical issue, with numerous studies employing red team testing to enhance model security. Among these, jailbreak methods explore potential vulnerabilities by crafting malicious prompts that induce model outputs contrary to safety alignments. Existing black-box jailbreak methods often rely on model feedback, repeatedly submitting queries with detectable malicious instructions during the attack search process. Although these approaches are effective, the attacks may be intercepted by content moderators during the search process. We propose an improved transfer attack method that guides malicious prompt construction by locally training a mirror model of the target black-box model through benign data distillation. This method offers enhanced stealth, as it does not involve submitting identifiable malicious instructions to the target model during the search phase. Our approach achieved a maximum attack success rate of 92%, or a balanced value of 80% with an average of 1.5 detectable jailbreak queries per sample against GPT-3.5 Turbo on a subset of AdvBench. These results underscore the need for more robust defense mechanisms.

Jiayi Zeng, Yizhe Feng, Mengliang He et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in error handling. Current error-handling works are performed in a passive manner, with explicit error-handling instructions. However, in real-world scenarios, explicit error-handling instructions are usually unavailable. In this paper, our work identifies this challenge as how to conduct proactive error handling without explicit error handling instructions. To promote further research, this work introduces a new benchmark, termed Mis-prompt, consisting of four evaluation tasks, an error category taxonomy, and a new evaluation dataset. Furthermore, this work analyzes current LLMs' performance on the benchmark, and the experimental results reveal that current LLMs show poor performance on proactive error handling, and SFT on error handling instances improves LLMs' proactive error handling capabilities. The dataset will be publicly available.

Mianxin Liu, Jinru Ding, Jie Xu et al.

Ensuring the general efficacy and goodness for human beings from medical large language models (LLM) before real-world deployment is crucial. However, a widely accepted and accessible evaluation process for medical LLM, especially in the Chinese context, remains to be established. In this work, we introduce "MedBench", a comprehensive, standardized, and reliable benchmarking system for Chinese medical LLM. First, MedBench assembles the currently largest evaluation dataset (300,901 questions) to cover 43 clinical specialties and performs multi-facet evaluation on medical LLM. Second, MedBench provides a standardized and fully automatic cloud-based evaluation infrastructure, with physical separations for question and ground truth. Third, MedBench implements dynamic evaluation mechanisms to prevent shortcut learning and answer remembering. Applying MedBench to popular general and medical LLMs, we observe unbiased, reproducible evaluation results largely aligning with medical professionals' perspectives. This study establishes a significant foundation for preparing the practical applications of Chinese medical LLMs. MedBench is publicly accessible at https://medbench.opencompass.org.cn.

Jie Xu, Lu Lu, Sen Yang et al.

METHODS: First, a set of evaluation criteria is designed based on a comprehensive literature review. Second, existing candidate criteria are optimized for using a Delphi method by five experts in medicine and engineering. Third, three clinical experts design a set of medical datasets to interact with LLMs. Finally, benchmarking experiments are conducted on the datasets. The responses generated by chatbots based on LLMs are recorded for blind evaluations by five licensed medical experts. RESULTS: The obtained evaluation criteria cover medical professional capabilities, social comprehensive capabilities, contextual capabilities, and computational robustness, with sixteen detailed indicators. The medical datasets include twenty-seven medical dialogues and seven case reports in Chinese. Three chatbots are evaluated, ChatGPT by OpenAI, ERNIE Bot by Baidu Inc., and Doctor PuJiang (Dr. PJ) by Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Experimental results show that Dr. PJ outperforms ChatGPT and ERNIE Bot in both multiple-turn medical dialogue and case report scenarios.