In-Context Multitask Learning for Few-shot Fine-tuning of Large Language Models in Traditional Chinese Medicine Tongue Diagnosis

Tongue diagnosis is integral to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for evaluating a patient’s body constitution. Yet, this field faces challenges such as indirect constitution diagnosis, a dearth of labeled datasets, and the complexities of few-shot learning. Existing studies focus mainly on analyzing tongue color and coating, rather than directly analyzing the body constitution from the patient’s tongue. Moreover, the lack of publicly available datasets with constitution labels impedes model development for constitution diagnosis. The resource-intensive process of creating large-scale labeled datasets calls for efficient training methods on small datasets. Addressing these issues, this paper presents an In-Context Multitask Learning approach to improve few-shot fine-tuning accuracy for Large Language Models (LLMs) in constitution diagnosis. We created a dataset for color-coating analysis and a few-shot dataset with constitution labels and a structured prompt-label framework, allowing LLMs to learn from varied datasets. Our method shows improved performance over traditional methods in constitution diagnosis and significantly boosts LLMs’ generalization and robustness in TCM’s complex diagnostic tasks, providing a viable path for automating tongue diagnosis.