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

To develop soft prompt-based learning architecture for large language models (LLMs), examine prompt-tuning using frozen/unfrozen LLMs, and assess their abilities in transfer learning and few-shot learning.

We developed a soft prompt-based learning architecture and compared 4 strategies including (1) fine-tuning without prompts; (2) hard-prompting with unfrozen LLMs; (3) soft-prompting with unfrozen LLMs; and (4) soft-prompting with frozen LLMs. We evaluated GatorTron, a clinical LLM with up to 8.9 billion parameters, and compared GatorTron with 4 existing transformer models for clinical concept and relation extraction on 2 benchmark datasets for adverse drug events and social determinants of health (SDoH). We evaluated the few-shot learning ability and generalizability for cross-institution applications.

When LLMs are unfrozen, GatorTron-3.9B with soft prompting achieves the best strict F1-scores of 0.9118 and 0.8604 for concept extraction, outperforming the traditional fine-tuning and hard prompt-based models by 0.6 ∼ 3.1 % and 1.2 ∼ 2.9 %, respectively; GatorTron-345 M with soft prompting achieves the best F1-scores of 0.8332 and 0.7488 for end-to-end relation extraction, outperforming other two models by 0.2 ∼ 2 % and 0.6 ∼ 11.7 %, respectively. When LLMs are frozen, small LLMs have a big gap to be competitive with unfrozen models; scaling LLMs up to billions of parameters makes frozen LLMs competitive with unfrozen models. Soft prompting with a frozen GatorTron-8.9B model achieved the best performance for cross-institution evaluation. We demonstrate that (1) machines can learn soft prompts better than hard prompts composed by human, (2) frozen LLMs have good few-shot learning ability and generalizability for cross-institution applications, (3) frozen LLMs reduce computing cost to 2.5 ∼ 6 % of previous methods using unfrozen LLMs, and (4) frozen LLMs require large models (e.g., over several billions of parameters) for good performance.