Healthcare needs trustworthy LLMs: Introducing Deterministic Quoting

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2024-05-05 11:00:03

LLMs have the potential to revolutionise healthcare, but the fear and reality of hallucinations prevent adoption in most applications.

At Invetech, we’re working on “Deterministic Quoting”, a new technique that ensures quotations from source material are verbatim, not hallucinated.

In this example, everything displayed with a blue background is guaranteed to be verbatim from source material. No hallucinations. LLMs remain imperfect, so it may still choose to quote the wrong part of the source material, but only “real” quotations are displayed on blue - they are deterministically generated.

We think Deterministic Quoting is an “enabler” for deploying LLMs where there are serious consequences to incorrect information, such as:

Many LLM systems can be designed to deterministically quote. This article provides motivation and explains a basic implementation.

In naturally conservative fields like healthcare we do not deploy systems that are reliable “most of the time”. Even a low rate of hallucination is enough to prevent adoption at scale for most of our use-cases. We simply can’t burden users with the task of independent verification – mistakes and their consequences are inevitable.