Large Language Models Vote: Prompting for Rare Disease Identification

The emergence of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) emphasizes the need for accurate and efficient prompting approaches. LLMs are often applied in Few-Shot Learning (FSL) contexts, where tasks are executed with minimal training data. FSL has become popular in many Artificial Intelligence (AI) subdomains, including AI for health. Rare diseases, affecting a small fraction of the population, inherently require FSL techniques due to limited data availability, though manual data collection and annotation is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose Models-Vote Prompting (MVP), a flexible prompting approach for improving the performance of LLM queries in FSL settings. MVP works by prompting numerous LLMs to perform the same tasks and then conducting a majority vote on the resulting outputs. This method achieves improved results to any one model in the ensemble on one-shot rare disease identification and classification tasks. We also release a novel rare disease dataset for FSL, available to those who agreed to the MIMIC-IV Data Use Agreement (DUA). Furthermore, in using MVP, each model is prompted multiple times, substantially increasing the time needed for manual annotation, and to address this, we assess the feasibility of using JSON for automating generative LLM evaluation.