RAG-Instruct: Boosting LLMs with Diverse Retrieval-Augmented Instructions

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, current RAG methods face two limitations: (1) they only cover limited RAG scenarios. (2) They suffer from limited task diversity due to the lack of a general RAG dataset. To address these limitations, we propose RAG-Instruct, a general method for synthesizing diverse and high-quality RAG instruction data based on any source corpus. Our approach leverages (1) five RAG paradigms, which encompass diverse query-document relationships, and (2) instruction simulation, which enhances instruction diversity and quality by utilizing the strengths of existing instruction datasets. Using this method, we construct a 40K instruction dataset from Wikipedia, comprehensively covering diverse RAG scenarios and tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RAG-Instruct effectively enhances LLMs' RAG capabilities, achieving strong zero-shot performance and significantly outperforming various RAG baselines across a diverse set of tasks. RAG-Instruct is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/RAG-Instruct.

HuatuoGPT-o1, Towards Medical Complex Reasoning with LLMs

The breakthrough of OpenAI o1 highlights the potential of enhancing reasoning to improve LLM. Yet, most research in reasoning has focused on mathematical tasks, leaving domains like medicine underexplored. The medical domain, though distinct from mathematics, also demands robust reasoning to provide reliable answers, given the high standards of healthcare. However, verifying medical reasoning is challenging, unlike those in mathematics. To address this, we propose verifiable medical problems with a medical verifier to check the correctness of model outputs. This verifiable nature enables advancements in medical reasoning through a two-stage approach: (1) using the verifier to guide the search for a complex reasoning trajectory for fine-tuning LLMs, (2) applying reinforcement learning (RL) with verifier-based rewards to enhance complex reasoning further. Finally, we introduce HuatuoGPT-o1, a medical LLM capable of complex reasoning, which outperforms general and medical-specific baselines using only 40K verifiable problems. Experiments show complex reasoning improves medical problem-solving and benefits more from RL. We hope our approach inspires advancements in reasoning across medical and other specialized domains.

CoD, Towards an Interpretable Medical Agent using Chain of Diagnosis

The field of medical diagnosis has undergone a significant transformation with the advent of large language models (LLMs), yet the challenges of interpretability within these models remain largely unaddressed. This study introduces Chain-of-Diagnosis (CoD) to enhance the interpretability of LLM-based medical diagnostics. CoD transforms the diagnostic process into a diagnostic chain that mirrors a physician's thought process, providing a transparent reasoning pathway. Additionally, CoD outputs the disease confidence distribution to ensure transparency in decision-making. This interpretability makes model diagnostics controllable and aids in identifying critical symptoms for inquiry through the entropy reduction of confidences. With CoD, we developed DiagnosisGPT, capable of diagnosing 9604 diseases. Experimental results demonstrate that DiagnosisGPT outperforms other LLMs on diagnostic benchmarks. Moreover, DiagnosisGPT provides interpretability while ensuring controllability in diagnostic rigor.

Domain-Hierarchy Adaptation via Chain of Iterative Reasoning for Few-shot Hierarchical Text Classification

Recently, various pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed to prove their impressive performances on a wide range of few-shot tasks. However, limited by the unstructured prior knowledge in PLMs, it is difficult to maintain consistent performance on complex structured scenarios, such as hierarchical text classification (HTC), especially when the downstream data is extremely scarce. The main challenge is how to transfer the unstructured semantic space in PLMs to the downstream domain hierarchy. Unlike previous work on HTC which directly performs multi-label classification or uses graph neural network (GNN) to inject label hierarchy, in this work, we study the HTC problem under a few-shot setting to adapt knowledge in PLMs from an unstructured manner to the downstream hierarchy. Technically, we design a simple yet effective method named Hierarchical Iterative Conditional Random Field (HierICRF) to search the most domain-challenging directions and exquisitely crafts domain-hierarchy adaptation as a hierarchical iterative language modeling problem, and then it encourages the model to make hierarchical consistency self-correction during the inference, thereby achieving knowledge transfer with hierarchical consistency preservation. We perform HierICRF on various architectures, and extensive experiments on two popular HTC datasets demonstrate that prompt with HierICRF significantly boosts the few-shot HTC performance with an average Micro-F1 by 28.80% to 1.50% and Macro-F1 by 36.29% to 1.5% over the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines under few-shot settings, while remaining SOTA hierarchical consistency performance.

Fast and Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding via Incremental LoRA

Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding (CKGE) aims to efficiently learn new knowledge and simultaneously preserve old knowledge. Dominant approaches primarily focus on alleviating catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge but neglect efficient learning for the emergence of new knowledge. However, in real-world scenarios, knowledge graphs (KGs) are continuously growing, which brings a significant challenge to fine-tuning KGE models efficiently. To address this issue, we propose a fast CKGE framework (\model), incorporating an incremental low-rank adapter (\mec) mechanism to efficiently acquire new knowledge while preserving old knowledge. Specifically, to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, \model\ isolates and allocates new knowledge to specific layers based on the fine-grained influence between old and new KGs. Subsequently, to accelerate fine-tuning, \model\ devises an efficient \mec\ mechanism, which embeds the specific layers into incremental low-rank adapters with fewer training parameters. Moreover, \mec\ introduces adaptive rank allocation, which makes the LoRA aware of the importance of entities and adjusts its rank scale adaptively. We conduct experiments on four public datasets and two new datasets with a larger initial scale. Experimental results demonstrate that \model\ can reduce training time by 34\%-49\% while still achieving competitive link prediction performance against state-of-the-art models on four public datasets (average MRR score of 21.0\% vs. 21.1\%).Meanwhile, on two newly constructed datasets, \model\ saves 51\%-68\% training time and improves link prediction performance by 1.5\%.

HuatuoGPT-Vision, Towards Injecting Medical Visual Knowledge into Multimodal LLMs at Scale

The rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4V, has led to significant advancements. However, these models still face challenges in medical multimodal capabilities due to limitations in the quantity and quality of medical vision-text data, stemming from data privacy concerns and high annotation costs. While pioneering approaches utilize PubMed's large-scale, de-identified medical image-text pairs to address these limitations, they still fall short due to inherent data noise. To tackle this, we refined medical image-text pairs from PubMed and employed MLLMs (GPT-4V) in an 'unblinded' capacity to denoise and reformat the data, resulting in the creation of the PubMedVision dataset with 1.3 million medical VQA samples. Our validation demonstrates that: (1) PubMedVision can significantly enhance the medical multimodal capabilities of current MLLMs, showing significant improvement in benchmarks including the MMMU Health & Medicine track; (2) manual checks by medical experts and empirical results validate the superior data quality of our dataset compared to other data construction methods. Using PubMedVision, we train a 34B medical MLLM HuatuoGPT-Vision, which shows superior performance in medical multimodal scenarios among open-source MLLMs.

LLMs for Doctors: Leveraging Medical LLMs to Assist Doctors, Not Replace Them

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has had a significant impact on the healthcare field, providing patients with medical advice, diagnostic information, and more. However, due to a lack of professional medical knowledge, patients are easily misled by generated erroneous information from LLMs, which may result in serious medical problems. To address this issue, we focus on tuning the LLMs to be medical assistants who collaborate with more experienced doctors. We first conduct a two-stage survey by inspiration-feedback to gain a broad understanding of the real needs of doctors for medical assistants. Based on this, we construct a Chinese medical dataset called DoctorFLAN to support the entire workflow of doctors, which includes 92K Q\&A samples from 22 tasks and 27 specialists. Moreover, we evaluate LLMs in doctor-oriented scenarios by constructing the DoctorFLAN-\textit{test} containing 550 single-turn Q\&A and DotaBench containing 74 multi-turn conversations. The evaluation results indicate that being a medical assistant still poses challenges for existing open-source models, but DoctorFLAN can help them significantly. It demonstrates that the doctor-oriented dataset and benchmarks we construct can complement existing patient-oriented work and better promote medical LLMs research.

LLMs Could Autonomously Learn Without External Supervision

In the quest for super-human performance, Large Language Models (LLMs) have traditionally been tethered to human-annotated datasets and predefined training objectives-a process that is both labor-intensive and inherently limited. This paper presents a transformative approach: Autonomous Learning for LLMs, a self-sufficient learning paradigm that frees models from the constraints of human supervision. This method endows LLMs with the ability to self-educate through direct interaction with text, akin to a human reading and comprehending literature. Our approach eliminates the reliance on annotated data, fostering an Autonomous Learning environment where the model independently identifies and reinforces its knowledge gaps. Empirical results from our comprehensive experiments, which utilized a diverse array of learning materials and were evaluated against standard public quizzes, reveal that Autonomous Learning outstrips the performance of both Pre-training and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), as well as retrieval-augmented methods. These findings underscore the potential of Autonomous Learning to not only enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM training but also to pave the way for the development of more advanced, self-reliant AI systems.

Towards Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding via Incremental Distillation

Traditional knowledge graph embedding (KGE) methods typically require preserving the entire knowledge graph (KG) with significant training costs when new knowledge emerges. To address this issue, the continual knowledge graph embedding (CKGE) task has been proposed to train the KGE model by learning emerging knowledge efficiently while simultaneously preserving decent old knowledge. However, the explicit graph structure in KGs, which is critical for the above goal, has been heavily ignored by existing CKGE methods. On the one hand, existing methods usually learn new triples in a random order, destroying the inner structure of new KGs. On the other hand, old triples are preserved with equal priority, failing to alleviate catastrophic forgetting effectively. In this paper, we propose a competitive method for CKGE based on incremental distillation (IncDE), which considers the full use of the explicit graph structure in KGs. First, to optimize the learning order, we introduce a hierarchical strategy, ranking new triples for layer-by-layer learning. By employing the inter- and intra-hierarchical orders together, new triples are grouped into layers based on the graph structure features. Secondly, to preserve the old knowledge effectively, we devise a novel incremental distillation mechanism, which facilitates the seamless transfer of entity representations from the previous layer to the next one, promoting old knowledge preservation. Finally, we adopt a two-stage training paradigm to avoid the over-corruption of old knowledge influenced by under-trained new knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of IncDE over state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, the incremental distillation mechanism contributes to improvements of 0.2%-6.5% in the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) score.

Meta In-Context Learning Makes Large Language Models Better Zero and Few-Shot Relation Extractors

Relation extraction (RE) is an important task that aims to identify the relationships between entities in texts. While large language models (LLMs) have revealed remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capability for general zero and few-shot learning, recent studies indicate that current LLMs still struggle with zero and few-shot RE. Previous studies are mainly dedicated to design prompt formats and select good examples for improving ICL-based RE. Although both factors are vital for ICL, if one can fundamentally boost the ICL capability of LLMs in RE, the zero and few-shot RE performance via ICL would be significantly improved. To this end, we introduce \textsc{Micre} (\textbf{M}eta \textbf{I}n-\textbf{C}ontext learning of LLMs for \textbf{R}elation \textbf{E}xtraction), a new meta-training framework for zero and few-shot RE where an LLM is tuned to do ICL on a diverse collection of RE datasets (i.e., learning to learn in context for RE). Through meta-training, the model becomes more effectively to learn a new RE task in context by conditioning on a few training examples with no parameter updates or task-specific templates at inference time, enabling better zero and few-shot task generalization. We experiment \textsc{Micre} on various LLMs with different model scales and 12 public RE datasets, and then evaluate it on unseen RE benchmarks under zero and few-shot settings. \textsc{Micre} delivers comparable or superior performance compared to a range of baselines including supervised fine-tuning and typical in-context learning methods. We find that the gains are particular significant for larger model scales, and using a diverse set of the meta-training RE datasets is key to improvements. Empirically, we show that \textsc{Micre} can transfer the relation semantic knowledge via relation label name during inference on target RE datasets.