ELAINE-medLLM: Lightweight English Japanese Chinese Trilingual Large Language Model for Bio-medical Domain

Ken Yano, Zheheng Luo, Jimin Huang, Qianqian Xie, Masaki Asada, Chenhan Yuan, Kailai Yang, Makoto Miwa, Sophia Ananiadou, Jun'ichi Tsujii

Abstract: We propose ELAINE (EngLish-jApanese-chINesE)-medLLM, a trilingual (English, Japanese, Chinese) large language model adapted for the bio-medical domain based on Llama-3-8B. The training dataset was carefully curated in terms of volume and diversity to adapt to the biomedical domain and endow trilingual capability while preserving the knowledge and abilities of the base model. The training follows 2-stage paths: continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our results demonstrate that ELAINE-medLLM exhibits superior trilingual capabilities compared to existing bilingual or multilingual medical LLMs without severely sacrificing the base model’s capability.