SampleLLM: Optimizing Tabular Data Synthesis in Recommendations

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have shown significant potential in radiology. Their effectiveness often depends on prompt engineering, which optimizes the interaction with the chatbot for accurate results. Here, we highlight the critical role of prompt engineering in tailoring the LLMs' responses to specific medical tasks. Using a clinical case, we elucidate different prompting strategies to adapt the LLM ChatGPT using GPT4 to new tasks without additional training of the base model. These approaches range from precision prompts to advanced in-context methods such as few-shot and zero-shot learning. Additionally, the significance of embeddings, which serve as a data representation technique, is discussed. Prompt engineering substantially improved and focused the chatbot's output. Moreover, embedding of specialized knowledge allows for more transparent insight into the model's decision-making and thus enhances trust. Despite certain challenges, prompt engineering plays a pivotal role in harnessing the potential of LLMs for specialized tasks in the medical domain, particularly radiology. As LLMs continue to evolve, techniques like few-shot learning, zero-shot learning, and embedding-based retrieval mechanisms will become indispensable in delivering tailored outputs. · Large language models might impact radiological practice and decision-masking.. · However, implementation and performance are dependent on the assigned task.. · Optimization of prompting strategies can substantially improve model performance.. · Strategies for prompt engineering range from precision prompts to zero-shot learning.. · Russe MF, Reisert M, Bamberg F et al. Improving the use of LLMs in radiology through prompt engineering: from precision prompts to zero-shot learning . Fortschr Röntgenstr 2024; 196: 1166 - 1170.

Model tuning or prompt Tuning? a study of large language models for clinical concept and relation extraction

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.

Picture description tasks, such as the Cookie Theft task, are widely used in neuropsychological assessments to detect cognitive impairment. However, manual scoring is time-consuming, requires specialized training, and is subject to interrater variability. Recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly large language models (LLMs), offer a promising solution to automate and standardize the scoring process. This study evaluated the performance and reliability of five LLMs (GPT-4 Turbo, GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Llama 3 70b) in scoring the Cookie Theft picture description task. A subset of 25 participants were selected from the DementiaBank corpus. The LLMs were tasked with scoring 22 content units in the participants' responses using various prompt strategies, including few-shot learning, prompt chaining, and self-consistency. LLM performance was compared to the consensus score of three human raters. LLMs demonstrated comparable accuracy to human raters in scoring the Cookie Theft task, with no significant differences in mean absolute error (MAE) between the best performing models and human raters. Few-shot learning significantly improved LLM performance, while prompt chaining and self-consistency showed limited benefits. Claude 3 Opus and GPT-4o exhibited the highest accuracy and reliability. Notably, LLMs showed significantly higher interrater reliability compared to human raters. The findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs to accurately and reliably score picture description tasks, offering a promising approach to streamline and standardize neuropsychological assessments. By automating the scoring process, clinicians and researchers can benefit from increased efficiency, reduced subjectivity, and improved scalability in evaluating cognitive functions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a transformative era in Natural Language Processing (NLP), reshaping research and extending NLP's influence to other fields of study. However, there is little to no work examining the degree to which LLMs influence other research fields. This work empirically and systematically examines the influence and use of LLMs in fields beyond NLP. We curate 106 LLMs and analyze ∼148k papers citing LLMs to quantify their influence and reveal trends in their usage patterns. Our analysis reveals not only the increasing prevalence of LLMs in non-CS fields but also the disparities in their usage, with some fields utilizing them more frequently than others since 2018, notably Linguistics and Engineering together accounting for ∼45% of LLM citations. Our findings further indicate that most of these fields predominantly employ task-agnostic LLMs, proficient in zero or few-shot learning without requiring further fine-tuning, to address their domain-specific problems. This study sheds light on the cross-disciplinary impact of NLP through LLMs, providing a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges.

In today’s fast-paced industry, professionals face the challenge of summarizing a large number of documents and extracting vital information from them on a daily basis. These metrics are frequently hidden away in tables and/or their nested hyperlinks. To address this challenge, the approach of Table Question Answering (QA) has been developed to extract the relevant information. However, traditional Table QA training tasks that provide a table and an answer(s) from a gold cell coordinate(s) for a question may not always ensure extracting the accurate answer(s). Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened up new possibilities for extracting information from tabular data using prompts. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-hop Few-shot Open Rich Table QA (MFORT-QA) approach, which consists of two major steps. The first step involves Few-Shot Learning (FSL), where relevant tables and associated contexts of hyperlinks are retrieved based on a given question. The retrieved content is then used to construct few-shot prompts as inputs to an LLM, such as ChatGPT. To tackle the challenge of answering complex questions, the second step leverages Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to decompose the complex question into a sequential chain of questions and reasoning thoughts in a multi-hop manner. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances this process by retrieving relevant tables and contexts of hyperlinks that are relevant to the resulting reasoning thoughts and questions. These additional contexts are then used to supplement the prompt used in the first step, resulting in more accurate answers from an LLM. Empirical results from OTT-QA demonstrate that our abstractive QA approach significantly improves the accuracy of extractive Table QA methods.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays an important role in online advertising systems. On the one hand, traditional CTR prediction models capture the collaborative signals in tabular data via feature interaction modeling, but they lose semantics in text. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in understanding the context and meaning behind text, but they face challenges in capturing collaborative signals and they have long inference latency. In this paper, we aim to leverage the benefits of both types of models and pursue collaboration, semantics and efficiency. We present ELEC, which is an Efficient LLM-Empowered CTR prediction framework. We first adapt an LLM for the CTR prediction task. In order to leverage the ability of the LLM but simultaneously keep efficiency, we utilize the pseudo-siamese network which contains a gain network and a vanilla network. We inject the high-level representation vector generated by the LLM into a collaborative CTR model to form the gain network such that it can take advantage of both tabular modeling and textual modeling. However, its reliance on the LLM limits its efficiency. We then distill the knowledge from the gain network to the vanilla network on both the score level and the representation level, such that the vanilla network takes only tabular data as input, but can still generate comparable performance as the gain network. Our approach is model-agnostic. It allows for the integration with various existing LLMs and collaborative CTR models. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ELEC for CTR prediction.

IntroductionRecent artificial intelligence (AI) advances can generate human-like responses to a wide range of queries, making them a useful tool for healthcare applications. Therefore, the potential use of large language models (LLMs) in controlled environments regarding efficacy, reproducibility, and operability will be of paramount interest.ObjectiveWe investigated if and how GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 models can be directly used as a part of a GxP validated system and compared the performance of externally hosted GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 against LLMs, which can be hosted internally. We explored zero-shot LLM performance for named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction tasks, investigated which LLM has the best zero-shot performance to be used potentially for generating training data proposals, evaluated the LLM performance of seven entities for medical NER in zero-shot experiments, selected one model for further performance improvement (few-shot and fine-tuning: Zephyr-7b-beta), and investigated how smaller open-source LLMs perform in contrast to GPT models and to a small fine-tuned T5 Base.MethodsWe performed reproducibility experiments to evaluate if LLMs can be used in controlled environments and utilized guided generation to use the same prompt across multiple models. Few-shot learning and quantized low rank adapter (QLoRA) fine-tuning were applied to further improve LLM performance.Results and ConclusionWe demonstrated that zero-shot GPT 4 performance is comparable with a fine-tuned T5, and Zephyr performed better than zero-shot GPT 3.5, but the recognition of product combinations such as product event combination was significantly better by using a fine-tuned T5. Although Open AI launched recently GPT versions to improve the generation of consistent output, both GPT variants failed to demonstrate reproducible results. The lack of reproducibility together with limitations of external hosted systems to keep validated systems in a state of control may affect the use of closed and proprietary models in regulated environments. However, due to the good NER performance, we recommend using GPT for creating annotation proposals for training data as a basis for fine-tuning.

To evaluate the capability of large language models (LLM), specifically GPT-4 and o1, in assessing adherence to the MI-CLEAR-LLM checklist in previously published studies. A total of 159 medical research articles related to LLM applications were analyzed. Two models-GPT-4o and o1-were tested in both text-based and image-based modalities. Structured prompts incorporating reasoning strategies such as chain-of-thought and few-shot learning were used to extract information corresponding to the six core items of the MI-CLEAR-LLM checklist. Human evaluations from a prior study served as the reference standard. Each model was evaluated across three independent trials to assess consistency. Accuracy and inter-trial agreement were calculated for each checklist item. Both GPT-4o and o1 demonstrated high accuracy in extracting objective, explicitly reported items, such as LLM specifications (name, manufacturer, web access, 85.9-100%) and stochasticity parameters (63.6-95%). However, performance declined for context-dependent items, including prompt session handling (Item4, 51.5-70.7%) and test data independence (Item6, 59.6-76.8%). Text-based models generally showed superior inter-trial consistency, with GPT-4o-text achieving the highest Fleiss' kappa (κ = 0.926). In contrast, image-based models exhibited greater variability (κ = 0.402-0.772). LLMs show strong potential for automating the evaluation of reporting quality in medical research, particularly for clearly structured content. However, they still face substantial challenges in extracting context-dependent or inferential information.

The application of deep learning to tabular data remains an ongoing challenge, with tree-based models such as XGBoost consistently outperforming neural network methods in most real-world scenarios. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) highlight their ability to generalize to new tasks via few-shot or one-shot prompting, yet questions remain about their utility in structured, tabular domains—particularly for resource-efficient Small Language Models (SLMs). In this work, we systematically evaluate the effectiveness of both large and small transformer-based language models for tabular classification tasks using few-shot strategies. Our approach investigates input serialization schemes and prompt engineering to maximize performance in low-data regimes. Experiments on benchmark datasets—including Diabetes, Heart Failure, and German Credit Risk—demonstrate that well-designed SLMs can approach, and occasionally match, the performance of much larger models, substantially reducing the need for extensive labeled data and retraining. However, further advances are required for language models to consistently rival the strongest tree-ensemble baselines. Our findings support the idea that SLMs, when properly prompted, offer a promising, flexible, and label-efficient alternative for automating and dynamizing machine learning pipelines on tabular data.

SummarySustained engagement in HIV care and adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) are essential for achieving the UNAIDS “95-95-95” targets. Despite increased ART access, disengagement from care remains a significant issue, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Traditional machine learning (ML) models have shown moderate success in predicting care disengagement, which would enable early intervention. We develop an enhanced large language model (LLM) fine-tuned with electronic medical records (EMRs) to predict people at risk of disengaging from HIV care in Tanzania and to provide interpretative insights into modifiable risk factors.MethodsWe developed a novel AI model by enhancing a pre-trained LLM (LLaMA 3.1, an open-source pre-trained LLM released by Meta) using routinely collected EMRs from Tanzania’s National HIV Care and Treatment Program from January 1, 2018, to June 30, 2023 (4,809,765 records for 261,192 people) to identify people at risk of disengaging from HIV care or developing adverse outcomes. Outcomes included risk of ART non-adherence, non-suppressed viral load, and loss to follow-up. Models were evaluated internally (Kagera region) and externally (Geita region), with performance compared against state-of-art ML models and zero-shot LLMs. Additionally, a team of HIV physicians in Tanzania assessed the LLM’s predictions along with LLM provided justifications for a subset of patient records to evaluate their clinical relevance and reasoning.FindingsThe enhanced LLMs consistently outperformed the supervised ML model and zero-shot LLMs across all outcomes in both internal and external validation datasets. When focusing on the 25% of PLHIV predicted as most likely to lost-to-follow-up (LTFU), the model correctly identified 78% (2,515 of 3,224) of people living with HIV (PLHIV) genuinely at risk in internal validation and 73% (7,105 of 9,733) in external validation. Attention score analysis indicated that the enhanced LLM focused on keywords such as gaps in follow-up care and ART adherence. The human expert evaluation showed alignment between clinician assessments and the LLM’s predictions in 65% of cases, with experts finding the model’s justifications reasonable and clinically relevant in 92.3% of aligned cases.InterpretationIf implemented in HIV clinics, this LLM-based AI model could help allocate resources efficiently and deliver targeted interventions, improving retention in care and advancing the UNAIDS “95-95-95” targets. By functioning like a clinician–analyzing patient summaries, predicting risks, and offering reasoning–the enhanced LLM could be integrated into clinical workflows to complement human expertise, facilitating timely interventions and informed decision-making. If implemented widely, this human-AI collaboration has the potential to improve health outcomes for people living with HIV and reduce onward transmission.FundingThe study was supported by a grant from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH NIMH 1R01MH125746.

Global health is currently facing serious challenges due to the increasing number of chronic disease patients, such as those with heart failure, diabetes, and cancer. This issue arises from the limitations of electronic health record (EHR) systems, which are not yet fully capable of ensuring accurate clinical diagnoses because of potential data input errors and delays in symptom identification by medical personnel. In response to this issue, this paper focuses on the integration of medical tabular data with a classification approach based on classical machine learning (ML) and large language models (LLM) to improve the accuracy of patient diagnosis predictions. This paper aims to develop and compare the performance of various ML models, such as XGBoost, SVM, and logistic regression, as well as LLM models like Gemini, LLaMA, and Qwen in fine-tuning, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios. The paper results show that the combination of Gemini and the few-shot approach (250 shots) achieved the highest accuracy of up to 99.8% in predicting heart failure risk. The main finding of this study is that the narrative text representation of tabular data processed with LLM significantly enhances contextual understanding and classification accuracy, making this approach highly potent for application in AI-based clinical decision-making.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in educational contexts to provide personalized support to students and teachers. The unprecedented capacity of LLM‐based applications to understand and generate natural language can potentially improve instructional effectiveness and learning outcomes, but the integration of LLMs in education technology has renewed concerns over algorithmic bias, which may exacerbate educational inequalities. Building on prior work that mapped the traditional machine learning life cycle, we provide a framework of the LLM life cycle from the initial development of LLMs to customizing pre‐trained models for various applications in educational settings. We explain each step in the LLM life cycle and identify potential sources of bias that may arise in the context of education. We discuss why current measures of bias from traditional machine learning fail to transfer to LLM‐generated text (eg, tutoring conversations) because text encodings are high‐dimensional, there can be multiple correct responses, and tailoring responses may be pedagogically desirable rather than unfair. The proposed framework clarifies the complex nature of bias in LLM applications and provides practical guidance for their evaluation to promote educational equity. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic The life cycle of traditional machine learning (ML) applications which focus on predicting labels is well understood. Biases are known to enter in traditional ML applications at various points in the life cycle, and methods to measure and mitigate these biases have been developed and tested. Large language models (LLMs) and other forms of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) are increasingly adopted in education technologies (EdTech), but current evaluation approaches are not specific to the domain of education. What this paper adds A holistic perspective of the LLM life cycle with domain‐specific examples in education to highlight opportunities and challenges for incorporating natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) into EdTech. Potential sources of bias are identified in each step of the LLM life cycle and discussed in the context of education. A framework for understanding where to expect potential harms of LLMs for students, teachers, and other users of GenAI technology in education, which can guide approaches to bias measurement and mitigation. Implications for practice and/or policy Education practitioners and policymakers should be aware that biases can originate from a multitude of steps in the LLM life cycle, and the life cycle perspective offers them a heuristic for asking technology developers to explain each step to assess the risk of bias. Measuring the biases of systems that use LLMs in education is more complex than with traditional ML, in large part because the evaluation of natural language generation is highly context‐dependent (eg, what counts as good feedback on an assignment varies). EdTech developers can play an important role in collecting and curating datasets for the evaluation and benchmarking of LLM applications moving forward.

Abstract. Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP), demonstrating remarkable capabilities in understanding, generating, and manipulating human language. This comprehensive review explores the development, applications, optimizations, and challenges of LLMs. This paper begin by tracing the evolution of these models and their foundational architectures, such as the Transformer, GPT, and BERT. We then delve into the applications of LLMs in natural language understanding tasks, including sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, question answering, and text summarization, highlighting real-world use cases. Next, we examine the role of LLMs in natural language generation, covering areas such as content creation, language translation, personalized recommendations, and automated responses. We further discuss LLM applications in other NLP tasks like text style transfer, text correction, and language model pre-training. Subsequently, we explore techniques for optimizing and improving LLMs, including model compression, explainability, robustness, and security. Finally, we address the challenges posed by the significant computational requirements, sample inefficiency, and ethical considerations surrounding LLMs. We conclude by discussing potential future research directions, such as efficient architectures, few-shot learning, bias mitigation, and privacy-preserving techniques, which will shape the ongoing development and responsible deployment of LLMs in NLP.

OpenHarmony emerges as a potent force in the mobile app domain, poised to stand alongside established industry giants. ArkTS is its main language, enhancing TypeScript (TS) and JavaScript (JS) with strict typing for improved performance. Developers are encouraged to port popular TS/JS libraries to OpenHarmony, supported by detailed guidelines. However, this requires a deep understanding of ArkTS syntax, following porting specifications, and making manual changes. An automated solution is crucial to streamline this process and foster a robust software ecosystem. As a new programming language, ArkTS currently lacks essential analysis tools for automated analysis and porting of software libraries. However, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) shows promise for effectively addressing automated porting tasks. There are two challenges in using LLMs to automate the porting of TS/JS libraries to OpenHarmony: (1) LLMs have limited exposure to ArkTS code, making it difficult for them to grasp the syntactical differences between ArkTS and JS/TS, as well as the various adaptation scenarios. (2) Project-level code adaptation often involves correcting numerous syntax mismatches, which complicates matters for LLMs as they must handle the interactions between different mismatches and interdependent code. In response, we introduce ArkAdapter, a project-level automatic code adaptation approach. ArkAdapter addresses Challenge 1 by establishing an adaptation knowledge repository for ArkTS syntax comprehension. It expands a collection of real code adaptation examples based on expert experience across various scenarios, improving the adaptation capabilities of LLMs through few-shot learning. ArkAdapter overcomes Challenge 2 based on an adaptation priority strategy by considering both the dependency structure and the granularity of syntax-mismatching code. This strategy helps prevent interference among various syntax mismatches and their interdependent code. Evaluation shows ArkAdapter achieves high precision (86.84