A Federated and Parameter-Efficient Framework for Large Language Model Training in Medicine

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on medical benchmarks, including question answering and diagnosis. To enable their use in clinical settings, LLMs are typically further adapted through continued pretraining or post-training using clinical data. However, most medical LLMs are trained on data from a single institution, which faces limitations in generalizability and safety in heterogeneous systems. Federated learning (FL) is a promising solution for enabling collaborative model development across healthcare institutions. Yet applying FL to LLMs in medicine remains fundamentally limited. First, conventional FL requires transmitting the full model during each communication round, which becomes impractical for multi-billion-parameter LLMs given the limited computational resources. Second, many FL algorithms implicitly assume data homogeneity, whereas real-world clinical data are highly heterogeneous across patients, diseases, and institutional practices. We introduce the model-agnostic and parameter-efficient federated learning framework for adapting LLMs to medical applications. Fed-MedLoRA transmits only low-rank adapter parameters, reducing communication and computation overhead, while Fed-MedLoRA+ further incorporates adaptive, data-aware aggregation to improve convergence under cross-site heterogeneity. We apply the framework to clinical information extraction (IE), which transforms patient narratives into structured medical entities and relations. Accuracy was assessed across five patient cohorts through comparisons with BERT models, and LLaMA-3 and DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o models. Evaluation settings included (1) in-domain training and testing, (2) external validation on independent cohorts, and (3) a low-resource new-site adaptation scenario using real-world clinical notes from the Yale New Haven Health System.

BioPulse-QA: A Dynamic Biomedical Question-Answering Benchmark for Evaluating Factuality, Robustness, and Bias in Large Language Models

Objective: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in biomedical settings, and existing benchmark datasets have played an important role in supporting model development and evaluation. However, these benchmarks often have limitations. Many rely on static or outdated datasets that fail to capture the dynamic, context-rich, and high-stakes nature of biomedical knowledge. They also carry increasing risk of data leakage due to overlap with model pretraining corpora and often overlook critical dimensions such as robustness to linguistic variation and potential demographic biases. Materials and Methods: To address these gaps, we introduce BioPulse-QA, a benchmark that evaluates LLMs on answering questions from newly published biomedical documents including drug labels, trial protocols, and clinical guidelines. BioPulse-QA includes 2,280 expert-verified question answering (QA) pairs and perturbed variants, covering both extractive and abstractive formats. We evaluate four LLMs - GPT-4o, GPT-o1, Gemini-2.0-Flash, and LLaMA-3.1 8B Instruct - released prior to the publication dates of the benchmark documents. Results: GPT-o1 achieves the highest relaxed F1 score (0.92), followed by Gemini-2.0-Flash (0.90) on drug labels. Clinical trials are the most challenging source, with extractive F1 scores as low as 0.36. Discussion and Conclusion: Performance differences are larger for paraphrasing than for typographical errors, while bias testing shows negligible differences. BioPulse-QA provides a scalable and clinically relevant framework for evaluating biomedical LLMs.

Toward Automated Cognitive Assessment in Parkinson's Disease Using Pretrained Language Models

Understanding how individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) describe cognitive experiences in their daily lives can offer valuable insights into disease-related cognitive and emotional changes. However, extracting such information from unstructured patient narratives is challenging due to the subtle, overlapping nature of cognitive constructs. This study developed and evaluated natural language processing (NLP) models to automatically identify categories that reflect various cognitive processes from de-identified first-person narratives. Three model families, a Bio_ClinicalBERT-based span categorization model for nested entity recognition, a fine-tuned Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct model using QLoRA for instruction following, and GPT-4o mini evaluated under zero- and few-shot settings, were compared on their performance on extracting seven categories. Our findings indicated that model performance varied substantially across categories and model families. The fine-tuned Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct achieved the highest overall F1-scores (0.74 micro-average and 0.59 macro-average), particularly excelling in context-dependent categories such as thought and social interaction. Bio_ClinicalBERT exhibited high precision but low recall and performed comparable to Llama for some category types such as location and time but failed on other categories such as thought, emotion and social interaction. Compared to conventional information extraction tasks, this task presents a greater challenge due to the abstract and overlapping nature of narrative accounts of complex cognitive processes. Nonetheless, with continued refinement, these NLP systems hold promise for enabling low-burden, longitudinal monitoring of cognitive function and serving as a valuable complement to formal neuropsychological assessments in PD.

FinTagging: An LLM-ready Benchmark for Extracting and Structuring Financial Information

We introduce FinTagging, the first full-scope, table-aware XBRL benchmark designed to evaluate the structured information extraction and semantic alignment capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of XBRL-based financial reporting. Unlike prior benchmarks that oversimplify XBRL tagging as flat multi-class classification and focus solely on narrative text, FinTagging decomposes the XBRL tagging problem into two subtasks: FinNI for financial entity extraction and FinCL for taxonomy-driven concept alignment. It requires models to jointly extract facts and align them with the full 10k+ US-GAAP taxonomy across both unstructured text and structured tables, enabling realistic, fine-grained evaluation. We assess a diverse set of LLMs under zero-shot settings, systematically analyzing their performance on both subtasks and overall tagging accuracy. Our results reveal that, while LLMs demonstrate strong generalization in information extraction, they struggle with fine-grained concept alignment, particularly in disambiguating closely related taxonomy entries. These findings highlight the limitations of existing LLMs in fully automating XBRL tagging and underscore the need for improved semantic reasoning and schema-aware modeling to meet the demands of accurate financial disclosure. Code is available at our GitHub repository and data is at our Hugging Face repository.

ISPDiffuser: Learning RAW-to-sRGB Mappings with Texture-Aware Diffusion Models and Histogram-Guided Color Consistency

RAW-to-sRGB mapping, or the simulation of the traditional camera image signal processor (ISP), aims to generate DSLR-quality sRGB images from raw data captured by smartphone sensors. Despite achieving comparable results to sophisticated handcrafted camera ISP solutions, existing learning-based methods still struggle with detail disparity and color distortion. In this paper, we present ISPDiffuser, a diffusion-based decoupled framework that separates the RAW-to-sRGB mapping into detail reconstruction in grayscale space and color consistency mapping from grayscale to sRGB. Specifically, we propose a texture-aware diffusion model that leverages the generative ability of diffusion models to focus on local detail recovery, in which a texture enrichment loss is further proposed to prompt the diffusion model to generate more intricate texture details. Subsequently, we introduce a histogram-guided color consistency module that utilizes color histogram as guidance to learn precise color information for grayscale to sRGB color consistency mapping, with a color consistency loss designed to constrain the learned color information. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed ISPDiffuser outperforms state-of-the-art competitors both quantitatively and visually. The code is available at https://github.com/RenYangSCU/ISPDiffuser.

An Extensive Evaluation of PDDL Capabilities in off-the-shelf LLMs

In recent advancements, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited proficiency in code generation and chain-of-thought reasoning, laying the groundwork for tackling automatic formal planning tasks. This study evaluates the potential of LLMs to understand and generate Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL), an essential representation in artificial intelligence planning. We conduct an extensive analysis across 20 distinct models spanning 7 major LLM families, both commercial and open-source. Our comprehensive evaluation sheds light on the zero-shot LLM capabilities of parsing, generating, and reasoning with PDDL. Our findings indicate that while some models demonstrate notable effectiveness in handling PDDL, others pose limitations in more complex scenarios requiring nuanced planning knowledge. These results highlight the promise and current limitations of LLMs in formal planning tasks, offering insights into their application and guiding future efforts in AI-driven planning paradigms.

GeAR: Graph-enhanced Agent for Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation systems rely on effective document retrieval capabilities. By design, conventional sparse or dense retrievers face challenges in multi-hop retrieval scenarios. In this paper, we present GeAR, which advances RAG performance through two key innovations: (i) graph expansion, which enhances any conventional base retriever, such as BM25, and (ii) an agent framework that incorporates graph expansion. Our evaluation demonstrates GeAR's superior retrieval performance on three multi-hop question answering datasets. Additionally, our system achieves state-of-the-art results with improvements exceeding 10% on the challenging MuSiQue dataset, while requiring fewer tokens and iterations compared to other multi-step retrieval systems.

From An LLM Swarm To A PDDL-Empowered HIVE: Planning Self-Executed Instructions In A Multi-Modal Jungle

In response to the call for agent-based solutions that leverage the ever-increasing capabilities of the deep models' ecosystem, we introduce Hive -- a comprehensive solution for selecting appropriate models and subsequently planning a set of atomic actions to satisfy the end-users' instructions. Hive operates over sets of models and, upon receiving natural language instructions (i.e. user queries), schedules and executes explainable plans of atomic actions. These actions can involve one or more of the available models to achieve the overall task, while respecting end-users specific constraints. Notably, Hive handles tasks that involve multi-modal inputs and outputs, enabling it to handle complex, real-world queries. Our system is capable of planning complex chains of actions while guaranteeing explainability, using an LLM-based formal logic backbone empowered by PDDL operations. We introduce the MuSE benchmark in order to offer a comprehensive evaluation of the multi-modal capabilities of agent systems. Our findings show that our framework redefines the state-of-the-art for task selection, outperforming other competing systems that plan operations across multiple models while offering transparency guarantees while fully adhering to user constraints.

Can GPT-4 Help Detect Quit Vaping Intentions? An Exploration of Automatic Data Annotation Approach

In recent years, the United States has witnessed a significant surge in the popularity of vaping or e-cigarette use, leading to a notable rise in cases of e-cigarette and vaping use-associated lung injury (EVALI) that caused hospitalizations and fatalities during the EVALI outbreak in 2019, highlighting the urgency to comprehend vaping behaviors and develop effective strategies for cessation. Due to the ubiquity of social media platforms, over 4.7 billion users worldwide use them for connectivity, communications, news, and entertainment with a significant portion of the discourse related to health, thereby establishing social media data as an invaluable organic data resource for public health research. In this study, we extracted a sample dataset from one vaping sub-community on Reddit to analyze users' quit-vaping intentions. Leveraging OpenAI's latest large language model GPT-4 for sentence-level quit vaping intention detection, this study compares the outcomes of this model against layman and clinical expert annotations. Using different prompting strategies such as zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting, we developed 8 prompts with varying levels of detail to explain the task to GPT-4 and also evaluated the performance of the strategies against each other. These preliminary findings emphasize the potential of GPT-4 in social media data analysis, especially in identifying users' subtle intentions that may elude human detection.

Utilizing Large Language Models to Identify Reddit Users Considering Vaping Cessation for Digital Interventions

The widespread adoption of social media platforms globally not only enhances users' connectivity and communication but also emerges as a vital channel for the dissemination of health-related information, thereby establishing social media data as an invaluable organic data resource for public health research. The surge in popularity of vaping or e-cigarette use in the United States and other countries has caused an outbreak of e-cigarette and vaping use-associated lung injury (EVALI), leading to hospitalizations and fatalities in 2019, highlighting the urgency to comprehend vaping behaviors and develop effective strategies for cession. In this study, we extracted a sample dataset from one vaping sub-community on Reddit to analyze users' quit vaping intentions. Leveraging large language models including both the latest GPT-4 and traditional BERT-based language models for sentence-level quit-vaping intention prediction tasks, this study compares the outcomes of these models against human annotations. Notably, when compared to human evaluators, GPT-4 model demonstrates superior consistency in adhering to annotation guidelines and processes, showcasing advanced capabilities to detect nuanced user quit-vaping intentions that human evaluators might overlook. These preliminary findings emphasize the potential of GPT-4 in enhancing the accuracy and reliability of social media data analysis, especially in identifying subtle users' intentions that may elude human detection.