Tianyi: A Traditional Chinese Medicine all-rounder language model and its Real-World Clinical Practice

TL;DR

Tianyi is a specialized 7.6-billion-parameter language model designed for Traditional Chinese Medicine, trained on diverse TCM data, and evaluated with a new benchmark to enhance clinical practice and research integration.

Contribution

The paper introduces Tianyi, a TCM-specific large language model with a systematic training approach and a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, addressing limitations of general LLMs in TCM applications.

Findings

Tianyi demonstrates strong performance in TCM clinical tasks.

The model effectively integrates interconnected TCM knowledge.

Tianyi shows potential as an AI assistant in TCM practice.

Abstract

Natural medicines, particularly Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), are gaining global recognition for their therapeutic potential in addressing human symptoms and diseases. TCM, with its systematic theories and extensive practical experience, provides abundant resources for healthcare. However, the effective application of TCM requires precise syndrome diagnosis, determination of treatment principles, and prescription formulation, which demand decades of clinical expertise. Despite advancements in TCM-based decision systems, machine learning, and deep learning research, limitations in data and single-objective constraints hinder their practical application. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in complex tasks, but lack specialization in TCM and face significant challenges, such as too big model scale to deploy and issues with hallucination. To address these challenges, we introduce Tianyi with 7.6-billion-parameter LLM, a model scale proper and specifically designed for TCM, pre-trained and fine-tuned on diverse TCM corpora, including classical texts, expert treatises, clinical records, and knowledge graphs. Tianyi is designed to assimilate interconnected and systematic TCM knowledge through a progressive learning manner. Additionally, we establish TCMEval, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, to assess LLMs in TCM examinations, clinical tasks, domain-specific question-answering, and real-world trials. The extensive evaluations demonstrate the significant potential of Tianyi as an AI assistant in TCM clinical practice and research, bridging the gap between TCM knowledge and practical application.