Large language models (LLMs) like BERT are usually pre-trained on general domain corpora like Wikipedia and BookCorpus. If we apply them to more specialized domains like medical, there is often a drop in performance compared to models adapted for those domains.

In this article, we will explore how to adapt a pre-trained LLM like Deberta base to medical domain using the HuggingFace Transformers library. Specifically, we will cover an effective technique called intermediate pre-training where we do further pre-training of the LLM on data from our target domain. This adapts the model to the new domain, and improves its performance.

This is a simple yet effective technique to tune LLMs to your domain and gain significant improvements in downstream task performance. — Read More