JMLR: Joint Medical LLM and Retrieval Training for Enhancing Reasoning and Professional Question Answering Capability
This addresses hallucinations in medical question-answering for healthcare applications, offering an incremental improvement over existing retrieval-augmented methods.
The paper tackles the problem of hallucinations in medical LLMs by introducing JMLR, which jointly trains the LLM and retrieval model during fine-tuning, resulting in JMLR-13B achieving 70.5% accuracy on a medical QA dataset, outperforming larger models like Meditron-70B (68.9%) and training much faster (148 vs. 42630 GPU hours).
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a remarkable potential in medical knowledge acquisition and question-answering. However, LLMs can potentially hallucinate and yield factually incorrect outcomes, even with domain-specific pretraining. Previously, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has limited success in addressing hallucinations. Unlike previous methods in RAG where the retrieval model was trained separately from the LLM, we introduce JMLR (for Jointly trains LLM and information Retrieval) during the fine-tuning phase. The synchronized training mechanism enhances JMLR's ability to retrieve clinical guidelines and leverage medical knowledge to reason and answer questions and reduces the demand for computational resources. We evaluated JMLR on the important medical question-answering application. Our experimental results demonstrate that JMLR-13B (70.5%) outperforms a previous state-of-the-art open-source model using conventional pre-training and fine-tuning Meditron-70B (68.9%) and Llama2-13B with RAG (67.7%) on a medical question-answering dataset. Comprehensive evaluations reveal JMLR-13B enhances reasoning quality and reduces hallucinations better than Claude3-Opus. Additionally, JMLR-13B (148 GPU hours) also trains much faster than Meditron-70B (42630 GPU hours). Through this work, we provide a new and efficient knowledge enhancement method for healthcare, demonstrating the potential of integrating retrieval and LLM training for medical question-answering systems.