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Apr 14

PMC-Patients: A Large-scale Dataset of Patient Notes and Relations Extracted from Case Reports in PubMed Central

Objective: Data unavailability has been one of the biggest barriers in clinical natural language processing. This paper is aimed at providing a large-scale and publicly available patient note dataset, named PMC-Patients, with relevant articles and similar patients annotations. The ultimate goal of PMC-Patients is to facilitate the development of retrieval-based clinical decision support systems. Materials and Methods: To collect PMC-Patients, we extract patient notes from case reports in PubMed Central by recognizing certain section patterns. Patient-article relevance and patient-patient similarity are annotated by citation relationships in PubMed. In addition, we perform three tasks with PMC-Patients to demonstrate its utility in providing clinical decision support for a given patient, including (1) classifying whether another patient is similar, (2) retrieving similar patients in PMC-Patients, and (3) retrieving relevant articles in PubMed. Results: We collect and release PMC-Patients under the CC BY-NC-SA license, which becomes the largest publicly available patient note dataset so far. PMC-Patients contains 167k patient notes that are annotated with 3.1M relevant articles and 293k similar patients. Qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal the high quality and richness of our dataset. Experiments show that classifying the similarity of patient pairs is relatively easy, but it is hard to retrieve similar patients or relevant articles for a given patient from a large set of candidates. Conclusion: We present PMC-Patients, a large-scale dataset of patient notes with high quality, easy access, diverse conditions, and rich annotations. The proposed dataset can also serve as a hard benchmark for evaluating retrieval-based clinical decision support systems.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 28, 2022

Can open source large language models be used for tumor documentation in Germany? -- An evaluation on urological doctors' notes

Tumor documentation in Germany is largely done manually, requiring reading patient records and entering data into structured databases. Large language models (LLMs) could potentially enhance this process by improving efficiency and reliability. This evaluation tests eleven different open source LLMs with sizes ranging from 1-70 billion model parameters on three basic tasks of the tumor documentation process: identifying tumor diagnoses, assigning ICD-10 codes, and extracting the date of first diagnosis. For evaluating the LLMs on these tasks, a dataset of annotated text snippets based on anonymized doctors' notes from urology was prepared. Different prompting strategies were used to investigate the effect of the number of examples in few-shot prompting and to explore the capabilities of the LLMs in general. The models Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Mistral NeMo 12 B performed comparably well in the tasks. Models with less extensive training data or having fewer than 7 billion parameters showed notably lower performance, while larger models did not display performance gains. Examples from a different medical domain than urology could also improve the outcome in few-shot prompting, which demonstrates the ability of LLMs to handle tasks needed for tumor documentation. Open source LLMs show a strong potential for automating tumor documentation. Models from 7-12 billion parameters could offer an optimal balance between performance and resource efficiency. With tailored fine-tuning and well-designed prompting, these models might become important tools for clinical documentation in the future. The code for the evaluation is available from https://github.com/stefan-m-lenz/UroLlmEval. We also release the dataset as a new valuable resource that addresses the shortage of authentic and easily accessible benchmarks in German-language medical NLP.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 21, 2025 1

Towards Semantic Versioning of Open Pre-trained Language Model Releases on Hugging Face

The proliferation of open Pre-trained Language Models (PTLMs) on model registry platforms like Hugging Face (HF) presents both opportunities and challenges for companies building products around them. Similar to traditional software dependencies, PTLMs continue to evolve after a release. However, the current state of release practices of PTLMs on model registry platforms are plagued by a variety of inconsistencies, such as ambiguous naming conventions and inaccessible model training documentation. Given the knowledge gap on current PTLM release practices, our empirical study uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze the releases of 52,227 PTLMs on the most well-known model registry, HF. Our results reveal 148 different naming practices for PTLM releases, with 40.87% of changes to model weight files not represented in the adopted name-based versioning practice or their documentation. In addition, we identified that the 52,227 PTLMs are derived from only 299 different base models (the modified original models used to create 52,227 PTLMs), with Fine-tuning and Quantization being the most prevalent modification methods applied to these base models. Significant gaps in release transparency, in terms of training dataset specifications and model card availability, still exist, highlighting the need for standardized documentation. While we identified a model naming practice explicitly differentiating between major and minor PTLM releases, we did not find any significant difference in the types of changes that went into either type of releases, suggesting that major/minor version numbers for PTLMs often are chosen arbitrarily. Our findings provide valuable insights to improve PTLM release practices, nudging the field towards more formal semantic versioning practices.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 16, 2024

How do Machine Learning Models Change?

The proliferation of Machine Learning (ML) models and their open-source implementations has transformed Artificial Intelligence research and applications. Platforms like Hugging Face (HF) enable the development, sharing, and deployment of these models, fostering an evolving ecosystem. While previous studies have examined aspects of models hosted on platforms like HF, a comprehensive longitudinal study of how these models change remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by utilizing both repository mining and longitudinal analysis methods to examine over 200,000 commits and 1,200 releases from over 50,000 models on HF. We replicate and extend an ML change taxonomy for classifying commits and utilize Bayesian networks to uncover patterns in commit and release activities over time. Our findings indicate that commit activities align with established data science methodologies, such as CRISP-DM, emphasizing iterative refinement and continuous improvement. Additionally, release patterns tend to consolidate significant updates, particularly in documentation, distinguishing between granular changes and milestone-based releases. Furthermore, projects with higher popularity prioritize infrastructure enhancements early in their lifecycle, and those with intensive collaboration practices exhibit improved documentation standards. These and other insights enhance the understanding of model changes on community platforms and provide valuable guidance for best practices in model maintenance.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 14, 2024

AgentDevel: Reframing Self-Evolving LLM Agents as Release Engineering

Recent progress in large language model (LLM) agents has largely focused on embedding self-improvement mechanisms inside the agent or searching over many concurrent variants. While these approaches can raise aggregate scores, they often yield unstable and hard-to-audit improvement trajectories, making it difficult to guarantee non-regression or to reason about failures across versions. We reframe agent improvement as release engineering: agents are treated as shippable artifacts, and improvement is externalized into a regression-aware release pipeline. We introduce AgentDevel, a release engineering pipeline that iteratively runs the current agent, produces implementation-blind, symptom-level quality signals from execution traces, synthesizes a single release candidate (RC) via executable diagnosis, and promotes it under flip-centered gating. AgentDevel features three core designs: (i) an implementation-blind LLM critic that characterizes failure appearances without accessing agent internals, (ii) script-based executable diagnosis that aggregates dominant symptom patterns and produces auditable engineering specifications, and (iii) flip-centered gating that prioritizes pass to fail regressions and fail to pass fixes as first-class evidence. Unlike population-based search or in-agent self-refinement, AgentDevel maintains a single canonical version line and emphasizes non-regression as a primary objective. Experiments on execution-heavy benchmarks demonstrate that AgentDevel yields stable improvements with significantly fewer regressions while producing reproducible, auditable artifacts. Overall, AgentDevel provides a practical development discipline for building, debugging, and releasing LLM agents as software development.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 8 2

PyRadar: Towards Automatically Retrieving and Validating Source Code Repository Information for PyPI Packages

A package's source code repository records the development history of the package, providing indispensable information for the use and risk monitoring of the package. However, a package release often misses its source code repository due to the separation of the package's development platform from its distribution platform. Existing tools retrieve the release's repository information from its metadata, which suffers from two limitations: the metadata may not contain or contain wrong information. Our analysis shows that existing tools can only retrieve repository information for up to 70.5% of PyPI releases. To address the limitations, this paper proposes PyRadar, a novel framework that utilizes the metadata and source distribution to retrieve and validate the repository information for PyPI releases. We start with an empirical study to compare four existing tools on 4,227,425 PyPI releases and analyze phantom files (files appearing in the release's distribution but not in the release's repository) in 14,375 correct package-repository links and 2,064 incorrect links. Based on the findings, we design PyRadar with three components, i.e., Metadata-based Retriever, Source Code Repository Validator, and Source Code-based Retriever. In particular, the Metadata-based Retriever combines best practices of existing tools and successfully retrieves repository information from the metadata for 72.1% of PyPI releases. The Source Code Repository Validator applies common machine learning algorithms on six crafted features and achieves an AUC of up to 0.995. The Source Code-based Retriever queries World of Code with the SHA-1 hashes of all Python files in the release's source distribution and retrieves repository information for 90.2% of packages in our dataset with an accuracy of 0.970. Both practitioners and researchers can employ the PyRadar to better use PyPI packages.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 25, 2024