# 70B-parameter large language models in Japanese medical question-answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14882 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14882/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16452/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Sensitivity to The Order of Options in Multiple-Choice Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11483/) (2023)
- [PIXIU: A Large Language Model, Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05443/) (2023)
- [PMC-LLaMA: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14454/) (2023)
- [Evaluating GPT-4 and ChatGPT on Japanese Medical Licensing Examinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18027/) (2023)
- [JMedLoRA:Medical Domain Adaptation on Japanese Large Language Models using Instruction-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10083/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Stabilizing Reasoning in Medical LLMs with Continued Pretraining and Reasoning Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18080/) (2025)
- [Development and bilingual evaluation of Japanese medical large language model within reasonably low computational resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11783/) (2024)
- [A Japanese Language Model and Three New Evaluation Benchmarks for Pharmaceutical NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16661/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since the rise of large language models (LLMs), the domain adaptation has been one of the hot topics in various domains. Many medical LLMs trained with English medical dataset have made public recently. However, Japanese LLMs in medical domain still lack its research. Here we utilize multiple 70B-parameter LLMs for the first time and show that instruction tuning using Japanese medical question-answering dataset significantly improves the ability of Japanese LLMs to solve Japanese medical license exams, surpassing 50% in accuracy. In particular, the Japanese-centric models exhibit a more significant leap in improvement through instruction tuning compared to their English-centric counterparts. This underscores the importance of continual pretraining and the adjustment of the tokenizer in our local language. We also examine two slightly different prompt formats, resulting in non-negligible performance improvement.