Towards Democratizing Multilingual Large Language Models For Medicine Through A Two-Stage Instruction Fine-tuning Approach
This work addresses the problem of making medical AI more accessible for linguistically diverse populations, though it is incremental as it builds on existing fine-tuning methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of adapting multilingual large language models for medicine by introducing a two-stage instruction fine-tuning approach with new datasets, achieving competitive results on English and multilingual benchmarks while balancing computational efficiency.
Open-source, multilingual medical large language models (LLMs) have the potential to serve linguistically diverse populations across different regions. Adapting generic LLMs for healthcare often requires continual pretraining, but this approach is computationally expensive and sometimes impractical. Instruction fine-tuning on a specific task may not always guarantee optimal performance due to the lack of broader domain knowledge that the model needs to understand and reason effectively in diverse scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce two multilingual instruction fine-tuning datasets, MMed-IFT and MMed-IFT-MC, containing over 200k high-quality medical samples in six languages. We propose a two-stage training paradigm: the first stage injects general medical knowledge using MMed-IFT, while the second stage fine-tunes task-specific multiple-choice questions with MMed-IFT-MC. Our method achieves competitive results on both English and multilingual benchmarks, striking a balance between computational efficiency and performance. We plan to make our dataset and model weights public at \url{https://github.com/SpassMed/Med-Llama3} in the future.