Enhancing legal question answering with data generation and knowledge distillation from large language models

Evaluating gpt-4 for zero-shot classification of bleeding and clotting events: Can large language models serve as second reviewers?

Purpose This study aims to explore the integration of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) in robotics, highlighting their potential benefits and the safety challenges they introduce, including robustness issues, adversarial vulnerabilities, privacy concerns and ethical implications. Design/methodology/approach This survey conducts a comprehensive analysis of the safety risks associated with LLM- and VLM-powered robotic systems. The authors review existing literature, analyze key challenges, evaluate current mitigation strategies and propose future research directions. Findings The study identifies that ensuring the safety of LLM-/VLM-driven robots requires a multi-faceted approach. While current mitigation strategies address certain risks, gaps remain in real-time monitoring, adversarial robustness and ethical safeguards. Originality/value This study offers a structured and comprehensive overview of the safety challenges in LLM-/VLM-driven robotics. It contributes to ongoing discussions by integrating technical, ethical and regulatory perspectives to guide future advancements in safe and responsible artificial intelligence-driven robotics.

Named entity recognition (NER) plays a vital role in extracting critical medical entities from health care records, facilitating applications such as clinical decision support and data mining. Developing robust NER models for low-resource languages, such as Estonian, remains a challenge due to the scarcity of annotated data and domain-specific pretrained models. Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be promising in understanding text from any language or domain. This study addresses the development of medical NER models for low-resource languages, specifically Estonian. We propose a novel approach by generating synthetic health care data and using LLMs to annotate them. These synthetic data are then used to train a high-performing NER model, which is applied to real-world medical texts, preserving patient data privacy. Our approach to overcoming the shortage of annotated Estonian health care texts involves a three-step pipeline: (1) synthetic health care data are generated using a locally trained GPT-2 model on Estonian medical records, (2) the synthetic data are annotated with LLMs, specifically GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4, and (3) the annotated synthetic data are then used to fine-tune an NER model, which is later tested on real-world medical data. This paper compares the performance of different prompts; assesses the impact of GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and a local LLM; and explores the relationship between the amount of annotated synthetic data and model performance. The proposed methodology demonstrates significant potential in extracting named entities from real-world medical texts. Our top-performing setup achieved an F1-score of 0.69 for drug extraction and 0.38 for procedure extraction. These results indicate a strong performance in recognizing certain entity types while highlighting the complexity of extracting procedures. This paper demonstrates a successful approach to leveraging LLMs for training NER models using synthetic data, effectively preserving patient privacy. By avoiding reliance on human-annotated data, our method shows promise in developing models for low-resource languages, such as Estonian. Future work will focus on refining the synthetic data generation and expanding the method's applicability to other domains and languages.

Aim/Purpose: The study investigates the factors influencing the acceptance and utilisation of large language models (LLMs) (predictor variables of LLM usage), such as ChatGPT, in Learning design by instructional designers and university-teaching academics from various countries. Background: Large language models (LLMs) have exploded onto the scene, transforming the landscape of learning design. Instructional designers and university teaching academics have been overburdened with content creation for their teaching programmes, and the arrival of LLM models will help in this regard by developing more interactive content that drives student engagement and, in turn, contributes to student success. Since LLMs are a relatively new phenomenon, little is known about the factors influencing their acceptance in learning design; therefore, this research is needed, as learning design principles are the bedrock of student engagement and success. Methodology: A cross-sectional correlational quantitative study was employed. Data was collected using an online questionnaire posted on social media, including LinkedIn, from 203 instructional designers and university teaching academics. Purposive and snowball sampling methods were used to target instructional designers and university teaching academics at colleges and universities worldwide. Participants were asked to share the survey link with fellow instructional designers and university-teaching academics in their communities. The factor structure of the data was determined using exploratory factor analysis. Nonetheless, the factor structure derived from the LLMs did not entirely reflect the original configuration of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT3), as certain predictors appeared to coalesce, indicating LLMs’ unique nature in learning design. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to verify the fit of the data on the measurement model. First-order and second-order structural modelling were used to identify the structural relationships among the variables. Contribution: The study determines significant factors for the acceptance of LLMs by instructional designers and academic teaching staff in learning design, enabling possible opportunities for best practices in the field through interventions to optimize LLM usage. The study applies the technology acceptance model to the emerging LLM technology and extends the technology acceptance model by adding the trust construct as a predictor variable. Findings: The structural analysis results indicated that the ingrained LLM practices, LLM peer-driven expectations, innovative propensity towards LLM adoption, reliability and provider trust in LLMs, and ease of use and support influenced perceived LLM benefits and usage, but community standards and infrastructure had no influence. The second-order structural equation modelling indicated that perceived LLM benefits and usage and ingrained LLM habits contributed most to the learning design. Recommendations for Practitioners: Teaching academics and instructional designers must use LLMs in designing content, assessments, and interactive learning activities, and attend LLM training workshops on prompting and best practices in integrating LLMs into learning and teaching to see their benefits; hence, regular use of LLMs will then lead to trust and innovation in LLMs usage, enhancing learning design and improving student learning outcomes. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers must use mixed methods approaches to have a deeper understanding of the factors influencing LLMs. Since habit and perceived LLM benefits and usage contributed the most variance to learning design, researchers must investigate strategies that optimise these factors in learning design, such as effective intervention strategies that can help form positive LLM habits. In addition, the findings provide researchers with a starting point for future research. Further researchers must investigate interventions that optimise the influence of personal innovativeness and trust that contributed the least variance to learning design, hence unlocking the potential of LLMs in learning design through innovation, responsible, and ethical use. Impact on Society: The use of LLMs in learning design has a high possibility of transforming education, specifically the learning design landscape. Using LLMs will free up more time for teaching academics and instructional designers so that they spend more time on higher-order thinking skill demands. Consequently, the students will be exposed to more engaging and interactive content, resulting in improved learning outcomes. Future Research: Future research must include context-derived external variables in technology acceptance models, such as levels of prompting competencies, to provide a deeper understanding of LLMs. In addition, future research must be based on the application and impact of LLMs on student engagement and success, and their attainment of 21st-century skills.

The paper studies the problem of software code migration during the transition from the old version of the SAP ERP 6.0 system to modern ERP platforms, in particular SAP S/4HANA. The necessity of automation of the migration process using artificial intelligence methods and tools is substantiated. A comprehensive analysis of existing academic and industrial case studies confirmed the feasibility of using large language models for code migration. A number of advantages of the approach based on large language models are revealed, in particular, the ability to handle various migration scenarios. The key risks and limitations common in the enterprise environment are highlighted, including data security, privacy, high cost of API calls and limited knowledge of models regarding the subject area. A method is developed for selecting a large open source language model that can be safely used in the enterprise landscape, thereby mitigating the risks associated with cloud solutions. The method is based on the developed system of criteria, including: model size, context window size, license type, support for fine-tuning training, focus on code quality (measured using a reference dataset), support for model quantization and community support. The hybrid AHP-TOPSIS method is proposed for systematic ranking of candidate models. The AHP method was used to check the weights of the criteria, while TOPSIS was used to rank the models based on their proximity to the ideal solution. Based on the developed method, three large language models were selected: Qwen 2.5 Coder 14B, DeepSeek-Coder-V2 16B and Llama 3.1 8B. A comprehensive testing plan for the selected models was developed for further experimental studies. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the development of a method for selecting large language models for custom code migration tasks, which differs from the existing system of model selection criteria and the use of a hybrid AHP-TOPSIS approach for ranking candidate models. The practical value of the work is that the developed method allows you to select a model taking into account the constraints of the corporate environment and information security requirements, which will increase the level of automation in the migration of AVAP when switching to new versions of ERP systems from SAP SE. The developed method can be applied to the selection of large language models when upgrading any large computer systems developed in both open source and proprietary programming languages.

The subject of the study is the analysis and improvement of methods for determining the relevance of project names to the information content of purchases using large language models. The object of the study is a database containing the names of projects and purchases in the field of electric power industry, collected from open sources. The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as the use of TF-IDF and cosine similarity metrics for primary data filtering, and also describes in detail the integration and evaluation of the effectiveness of large language models such as GigaChat, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 in text data matching tasks. Special attention is paid to the methods of clarifying the similarity of names based on reflection introduced into the prompta of large language models, which makes it possible to increase the accuracy of data comparison. The study uses TF-IDF and cosine similarity methods for primary data analysis, as well as large GigaChat, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 language models for detailed verification of the relevance of project names and purchases, including reflection in model prompta to improve the accuracy of results. The novelty of the research lies in the development of a combined approach to determining the relevance of project names and purchases, combining traditional methods of processing text information (TF-IDF, cosine similarity) with the capabilities of large language models. A special contribution of the author to the research of the topic is the proposed methodology for improving the accuracy of data comparison by clarifying the results of primary selection using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models with optimized prompta, including reflection. The main conclusions of the study are confirmation of the prospects of using the developed approach in the tasks of information support for procurement processes and project implementation, as well as the possibility of using the results obtained for the development of text data mining systems in various sectors of the economy. The study showed that the use of language models makes it possible to improve the value of the F2 measure to 0.65, which indicates a significant improvement in the quality of data comparison compared with basic methods.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns about inference costs, increasing the need for research into model compression. While knowledge distillation (KD) is a prominent method for this, research on KD for generative language models like LLMs is relatively sparse, and the approach of distilling student-friendly knowledge, which has shown promising performance in KD for classification models, remains unexplored in generative language models. To explore this approach, we propose PromptKD, a simple yet effective method that utilizes prompt tuningfor the first time in KD -to enable generative language models to transfer student-friendly knowledge. Unlike previous works in classification that require fine-tuning the entire teacher model for extracting student-friendly knowledge, PromptKD achieves similar effects by adding a small number of prompt tokens and tuning only the prompt with student guidance. Extensive experiments on instruction-following datasets show that PromptKD achieves state-ofthe-art performance while adding only 0.0007% of the teacher's parameters as prompts. Further analysis suggests that distilling student-friendly knowledge alleviates exposure bias effectively throughout the entire training process, leading to performance enhancements. 1

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) and the increasing prevalence of electronic health records (EHRs) present significant opportunities for advancing health care research and practice. However, research that compares and applies LLMs to extract key epilepsy-related information from unstructured medical free text is under-explored. This study fills this gap by comparing and applying different open-source LLMs and methods to extract epilepsy information from unstructured clinic letters, thereby optimizing EHRs as a resource for the benefit of epilepsy research. We also highlight some limitations of LLMs. Employing a dataset of 280 annotated clinic letters from King's College Hospital, we explored the efficacy of open-source LLMs (Llama and Mistral series) for extracting key epilepsy-related information, including epilepsy type, seizure type, current anti-seizure medications (ASMs), and associated symptoms. The study used various extraction methods, including direct extraction, summarized extraction, and contextualized extraction, complemented by role-prompting and few-shot prompting techniques. Performance was evaluated against a gold standard dataset, and was also compared to advanced fine-tuned models and human annotations. Llama 2 13b (a 13-billion-parameter LLM developed by Meta) demonstrated superior extraction capabilities across tasks by consistently outperforming other LLMs (F1 = .80 in epilepsy-type extraction, F1 = .76 in seizure-type extraction, and F1 = .90 in current ASMs extraction). Here, F1 score is a balanced metric indicating the model's accuracy in correctly identifying relevant information without excessive false positives. The study highlights the direct extraction showing consistent high performance. Comparative analysis showed that LLMs outperformed current approaches like MedCAT (Medical Concept Annotation Tool) in extracting epilepsy-related information (.2 higher in F1). The results affirm the potential of LLMs in medical information extraction relating to epilepsy, offering insights into leveraging these models for detailed and accurate data extraction from unstructured texts. The study underscores the importance of method selection in optimizing extraction performance and suggests a promising avenue for enhancing medical research and patient care through advanced natural language processing technologies.

Several recent works seek to develop foundation models specifically for medical applications, adapting general-purpose large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) via continued pretraining on publicly available biomedical corpora.These works typically claim that such domain-adaptive pretraining (DAPT) improves performance on downstream medical tasks, such as answering medical licensing exam questions.In this paper, we compare seven public "medical" LLMs and two VLMs against their corresponding base models, arriving at a different conclusion: all medical VLMs and nearly all medical LLMs fail to consistently improve over their base models in the zero-/few-shot prompting regime for medical question-answering (QA) tasks.For instance, across the tasks and model pairs we consider in the 3-shot setting, medical LLMs only outperform their base models in 12.1% of cases, reach a (statistical) tie in 49.8% of cases, and are significantly worse than their base models in the remaining 38.2% of cases.Our conclusions are based on (i) comparing each medical model head-to-head, directly against the corresponding base model; (ii) optimizing the prompts for each model separately; and (iii) accounting for statistical uncertainty in comparisons.While these basic practices are not consistently adopted in the literature, our ablations show that they substantially impact conclusions.Our findings suggest that state-of-the-art generaldomain models may already exhibit strong medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities, and offer recommendations to strengthen the conclusions of future studies.

Large language models (LLMs) have made a significant impact on the fields of general artificial intelligence. General purpose LLMs exhibit strong logic and reasoning skills and general world knowledge but can sometimes generate misleading results when prompted on specific subject areas. LLMs trained with domain-specific knowledge can reduce the generation of misleading information (i.e. hallucinations) and enhance the precision of LLMs in specialized contexts. Training new LLMs on specific corpora however can be resource intensive. Here we explored the use of a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model which we tested on literature specific to a biomedical research area. OpenAI's GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Microsoft's Prometheus, and a custom RAG model were used to answer 19 questions pertaining to diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) disease biology and treatment. Eight independent reviewers assessed LLM responses based on accuracy, relevance, and readability, rating responses on a 3-point scale for each category. These scores were then used to compare LLM performance. The performance of the LLMs varied across scoring categories. On accuracy and relevance, the RAG model outperformed other models with higher scores on average and the most top scores across questions. GPT-4 was more comparable to the RAG model on relevance versus accuracy. By the same measures, GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 had the highest scores for readability of answers when compared to the other LLMs. GPT-4 and 3.5 also had more answers with hallucinations than the other LLMs, due to non-existent references and inaccurate responses to clinical questions. Our findings suggest that an oncology research-focused RAG model may outperform general-purpose LLMs in accuracy and relevance when answering subject-related questions. This framework can be tailored to Q&A in other subject areas. Further research will help understand the impact of LLM architectures, RAG methodologies, and prompting techniques in answering questions across different subject areas.

In this article, we discuss ethical issues related to using and disclosing artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT and other systems based on large language models (LLMs), to write or edit scholarly manuscripts. Some journals, such as Science , have banned the use of LLMs because of the ethical problems they raise concerning responsible authorship. We argue that this is not a reasonable response to the moral conundrums created by the use of LLMs because bans are unenforceable and would encourage undisclosed use of LLMs. Furthermore, LLMs can be useful in writing, reviewing and editing text, and promote equity in science. Others have argued that LLMs should be mentioned in the acknowledgments since they do not meet all the authorship criteria. We argue that naming LLMs as authors or mentioning them in the acknowledgments are both inappropriate forms of recognition because LLMs do not have free will and therefore cannot be held morally or legally responsible for what they do. Tools in general, and software in particular, are usually cited in-text, followed by being mentioned in the references. We provide suggestions to improve APA Style for referencing ChatGPT to specifically indicate the contributor who used LLMs (because interactions are stored on personal user accounts), the used version and model (because the same version could use different language models and generate dissimilar responses, e.g., ChatGPT May 12 Version GPT3.5 or GPT4), and the time of usage (because LLMs evolve fast and generate dissimilar responses over time). We recommend that researchers who use LLMs: (1) disclose their use in the introduction or methods section to transparently describe details such as used prompts and note which parts of the text are affected, (2) use in-text citations and references (to recognize their used applications and improve findability and indexing), and (3) record and submit their relevant interactions with LLMs as supplementary material or appendices.

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to refuse to answer unknown questions. By modifying responses of unknown questions in the training data to refusal responses such as ''I don't know", RAIT enhances the reliability of LLMs and reduces their hallucination. Generally, RAIT modifies training samples based on the correctness of the initial LLM's response. However, this crude approach can cause LLMs to excessively refuse answering questions they could have correctly answered, the problem we call over-refusal. In this paper, we explore two primary causes of over-refusal: Static conflict occurs when similar samples within the LLM’s feature space receive differing supervision signals (original vs. modified ''I don't know"). Dynamic conflict arises as the LLM's evolving knowledge during SFT enables it to answer previously unanswerable questions, but the now-answerable training samples still retain the original ''I don't know" supervision signals from the initial LLM state, leading to inconsistencies. These conflicts cause the trained LLM to misclassify known questions as unknown, resulting in over-refusal. To address this issue, we introduce Certainty Represented Knowledge Flow for Refusal-Aware Instructions Tuning (CRaFT). CRaFT centers on two main contributions: First, we additionally incorporate response certainty to selectively filter and modify data, reducing static conflicts. Second, we implement preliminary rehearsal training to characterize changes in the LLM's knowledge state, which helps mitigate dynamic conflicts during the fine-tuning process. We conducted extensive experiments on open-ended question answering and multiple-choice question task. Experiment results show that CRaFT can improve LLM's overall performance during the RAIT process.

Readability & quality of large language model responses in CAR-T patient education

Large Language Models (LLMs) have enormous potential in healthcare, but we also need to be careful and implement strong safety measures. These advanced computer systems can understand complex medical questions written in everyday language and often provide accurate medical information. This article explores how the field has evolved, from the first language models to the LLMs we have now, specifically designed or adjusted for use in the medical world. We explore how LLMs can make important language-related tasks in healthcare more efficient and effective, such as identifying medical terms, understanding how different pieces of information are connected, drawing conclusions from written text, sorting documents, and answering medical queries. We also shed light on new and exciting ways LLMs can use more than just text, like combining written information with images or other types of data. We compare some of the best recent LLMs and discuss how they can be used in everyday medical situations. We also measure how well these models perform in the biomedical field, explaining what each measurement tells us and where it falls short. Lastly, by discussing the biggest hurdles LLMs face in healthcare—things like generating incorrect information (hallucinations), unfair biases, protecting patient privacy, making sure the models are dependable, and fitting these new tools into how doctors and nurses already work. We also provide a roadmap for future research. We aim to present a clear and fair picture of what LLMs can offer healthcare right now and what's necessary to use them safely and dependably. This includes explaining how researchers are working to make these models easier for doctors and patients to understand. We followed the PRISMA research method to guide our review of the field, from early language models to current LLMs adapted for clinical use.

Biases in language and their reflection in language models have attracted researchers' attention, particularly with the growth of large language models (LLMs). However, many questions on the links between language models and people’s biased attitudes remain unanswered. In the current study we focus on gender–career bias to examine the extent to which language models can be used to model behavioural responses in the Gender–Career Implicit Association Test (IAT). We provide a systematic evaluation of a range of language models, including n-gram, count vector, predict (word2vec), and Large Language Models (LLMs), to determine how well they capture people’s behaviour in the IAT. We compared response time data from over 800,000 participants against 25 language models, with a total of 675 model variants. We find that many language models, including large language models (LLMs), correlated well with human behavior. While results support previous findings for both predict and count model families, we observed that performance of LLMs was consistently different from that of simpler predict models, particularly in terms of the direction and strength of correlations with reaction time and bias. This divergence may indicate successful attempts to mitigate bias in LLMs while preserving other aspects of linguistic information. Our findings reinforce the idea that societal biases are generally encoded in language, but that large language models can exhibit behaviors different to classical language models.