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EMNLP Findings2024

BiMediX: Bilingual Medical Mixture of Experts LLM

Sara Pieri, Sahal Shaji Mullappilly, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Salman H. Khan, Timothy Baldwin, Hisham Cholakkal

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce BiMediX, the first bilingual medical mixture of experts LLM designed for seamless interaction in both English and Arabic. Our model facilitates a wide range of medical interactions in English and Arabic, including multi-turn chats to inquire about additional details such as patient symptoms and medical history, multiple-choice question answering, and open-ended question answering. We propose a semi-automated Englishto-Arabic translation pipeline with human refinement to ensure high-quality translations. We also introduce a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for Arabic medical LLMs. Furthermore, we introduce BiMed1.3M, an extensive Arabic-English bilingual instruction set that covers 1.3 Million diverse medical interactions, including 200k synthesized multiturn doctor-patient chats, in a 1:2 Arabic-to-English ratio. Our model outperforms stateof-the-art Med42 and Meditron by average absolute gains of 2.5% and 4.1%, respectively, computed across multiple medical evaluation benchmarks in English, while operating at 8-times faster inference. Moreover, our BiMediX outperforms the generic Arabic-English bilingual LLM, Jais-30B, by average absolute gains of 10% on our Arabic and 15% on our bilingual evaluations across multiple datasets. Additionally, BiMediX exceeds the accuracy of GPT4 by 4.4% in open-ended question UPHILL evaluation and largely outperforms state-of-the-art open source medical LLMs in human evaluations of multiturn conversations. Our trained models, instruction set, and source code are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/BiMediX.

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Cited by top-tier papers3

  1. A Comprehensive Survey of Scientific Large Language Models and Their Applications in Scientific DiscoveryYu Zhang, Xiusi Chen, Bowen Jin, Sheng Wang et al.EMNLP 2024 · 28 citations
  2. MedAraBench: Large-scale Arabic Medical Question Answering Dataset and BenchmarkMouath Abu Daoud, Leen Kharouf, Omar El Hajj, Dana El Samad et al.ICLR 2026 · 4 citations
  3. Ask Patients with Patience: Enabling LLMs for Human-Centric Medical Dialogue with Grounded ReasoningJiayuan Zhu, Jiazhen Pan, Yuyuan Liu, Fenglin Liu et al.EMNLP 2025 · 1 citation

Builds on10

  1. LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language ModelsEdward J. Hu, Yelong Shen, Phillip Wallis, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu et al.ICLR 2022 · 18,833 citations
  2. Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward ModelRafael Rafailov, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Christopher D. Manning et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 10,924 citations
  3. Measuring Massive Multitask Language UnderstandingDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou et al.ICLR 2021 · 7,905 citations
  4. QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMsTim Dettmers, Artidoro Pagnoni, Ari Holtzman, Luke ZettlemoyerNeurIPS 2023 · 5,863 citations
  5. ZeRO: memory optimizations toward training trillion parameter modelsSamyam Rajbhandari, Jeff Rasley, Olatunji Ruwase, Yuxiong HeSC 2020 · 852 citations

Related papers

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  2. BioMistral: A Collection of Open-Source Pretrained Large Language Models for Medical DomainsYanis Labrak, Adrien Bazoge, Emmanuel Morin, Pierre-Antoine Gourraud et al.ACL Findings 2024 · 271 citations
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  5. LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician ValidationMing Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Zelin Li, Huayu Sha et al.EMNLP Findings 2025 · 6 citations
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