ReMAG-KR: Retrieval and Medically Assisted Generation with Knowledge Reduction for Medical Question Answering

AbstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) have significant potential for facilitating intelligent end-user applications in healthcare. However, hallucinations remain an inherent problem with LLMs, making it crucial to address this issue with extensive medical knowledge and data. In this work, we propose a Retrieve-and-Medically-Augmented-Generation with Knowledge Reduction (ReMAG-KR) pipeline, employing a carefully curated knowledge base using cross-encoder re-ranking strategies. The pipeline is tested on medical MCQ-based QA datasets as well as general QA datasets. It was observed that when the knowledge base is reduced, the model’s performance decreases by 2-8%, while the inference time improves by 47%.