{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/enhancing-small-medical-learners-with-privacy","title":"Enhancing Small Medical Learners with Privacy-preserving Contextual Prompting","arxiv_id":"2305.12723","date":"2023-05-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xinlu Zhang","Shiyang Li","Xianjun Yang","Chenxin Tian","Yao Qin","Linda Ruth Petzold"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable medical expertise, but data privacy concerns impede their direct use in healthcare environments. Although offering improved data privacy protection, domain-specific small language models (SLMs) often underperform LLMs, emphasizing the need for methods that reduce this performance gap while alleviating privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method that harnesses LLMs' medical proficiency to boost SLM performance in medical tasks under privacy-restricted scenarios. Specifically, we mitigate patient privacy issues by extracting keywords from medical data and prompting the LLM to generate a medical knowledge-intensive context by simulating clinicians' thought processes. This context serves as additional input for SLMs, augmenting their decision-making capabilities. Our method significantly enhances performance in both few-shot and full training settings across three medical knowledge-intensive tasks, achieving up to a 22.57% increase in absolute accuracy compared to SLM fine-tuning without context, and sets new state-of-the-art results in two medical tasks within privacy-restricted scenarios. Further out-of-domain testing and experiments in two general domain datasets showcase its generalizability and broad applicability. Our code can be found at https://github.com/XZhang97666/PrivacyBoost-SLM.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12723v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.12723v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"enhancing-small-medical-learners-with-privacy","repo_url":"https://github.com/xzhang97666/privacyboost-slm","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"privacy-preserving","task_name":"Privacy Preserving"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2305.12723","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.12723","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}