paper

Large Language Models Perform Diagnostic Reasoning

arXiv:2307.08922

Abstract

We explore the extension of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to medical reasoning for the task of automatic diagnosis. Motivated by doctors' underlying reasoning process, we present Diagnostic-Reasoning CoT (DR-CoT). Empirical results demonstrate that by simply prompting large language models trained only on general text corpus with two DR-CoT exemplars, the diagnostic accuracy improves by 15% comparing to standard prompting. Moreover, the gap reaches a pronounced 18% in out-domain settings. Our findings suggest expert-knowledge reasoning in large language models can be elicited through proper promptings.

Accepted as a Tiny Paper at ICLR 2023 (10 pages, 5 figures)

Large Language Models Perform Diagnostic Reasoning · wovepaper