A Novel Compact LLM Framework for Local, High-Privacy EHR Data Applications

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in natural language processing, yet their use in sensitive domains like healthcare, particularly with Electronic Health Records (EHR), faces significant challenges due to privacy concerns and limited computational resources. This paper presents a compact LLM framework designed for local deployment in settings with strict privacy requirements and limited access to high-performance GPUs. We introduce a novel preprocessing technique that uses information extraction methods, e.g., regular expressions, to filter and emphasize critical information in clinical notes, enhancing the performance of smaller LLMs on EHR data. Our framework is evaluated using zero-shot and few-shot learning paradigms on both private and publicly available (MIMIC-IV) datasets, and we also compare its performance with fine-tuned LLMs on the MIMIC-IV dataset. The results demonstrate that our preprocessing approach significantly boosts the prediction accuracy of smaller LLMs, making them suitable for high-privacy, resource-constrained applications. This study offers valuable insights into optimizing LLM performance for sensitive, data-intensive tasks while addressing computational and privacy limitations.

Learning How To Learn Within An LSM-based Key-Value Store

We introduce BOURBON, a log-structured merge (LSM) tree that utilizes machine learning to provide fast lookups. We base the design and implementation of BOURBON on empirically grounded principles that we derive through careful analysis of LSM design. BOURBON employs greedy piecewise linear regression to learn key distributions, enabling fast lookup with minimal computation, and applies a cost-benefit strategy to decide when learning will be worthwhile. Through a series of experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that BOURBON improves lookup performance by 1.23x-1.78x as compared to state-of-the-art production LSMs.