Tag-LLM: Repurposing General-Purpose LLMs for Specialized Domains
This addresses the challenge for researchers and practitioners in specialized fields who need accurate LLM-based solutions, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of general-purpose LLMs underperforming in specialized domains like physical and biomedical sciences by introducing a model-agnostic framework with custom input tags to condition LLMs, resulting in improved performance that outperforms expert models in tasks such as predicting protein or chemical properties.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating natural language. However, their capabilities wane in highly specialized domains underrepresented in the pretraining corpus, such as physical and biomedical sciences. This work explores how to repurpose general LLMs into effective task solvers for specialized domains. We introduce a novel, model-agnostic framework for learning custom input tags, which are parameterized as continuous vectors appended to the LLM's embedding layer, to condition the LLM. We design two types of input tags: domain tags are used to delimit specialized representations (e.g., chemical formulas) and provide domain-relevant context; function tags are used to represent specific functions (e.g., predicting molecular properties) and compress function-solving instructions. We develop a three-stage protocol to learn these tags using auxiliary data and domain knowledge. By explicitly disentangling task domains from task functions, our method enables zero-shot generalization to unseen problems through diverse combinations of the input tags. It also boosts LLM's performance in various specialized domains, such as predicting protein or chemical properties and modeling drug-target interactions, outperforming expert models tailored to these tasks.