Multimodal Integrated Knowledge Transfer to Large Language Models through Preference Optimization with Biomedical Applications.

The scarcity of high-quality multimodal biomedical data limits the ability to effectively fine-tune pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized biomedical tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce MINT (Multimodal Integrated kNowledge Transfer), a framework that aligns unimodal large decoder models with domain-specific decision patterns from high-quality multimodal biomedical data through preference optimization. While MINT supports different optimization techniques, we primarily implement it with the Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO) framework as its backbone. This strategy enables the aligned LLMs to perform predictive tasks using text-only or image-only inputs while retaining knowledge learnt from multimodal data. MINT leverages an upstream multimodal machine learning (MML) model trained on high-quality multimodal data to transfer domain-specific insights to downstream text-only or image-only LLMs. We demonstrate MINT's effectiveness through two key applications: (1) Rare genetic disease prediction from texts, where MINT uses a multimodal encoder model, trained on facial photos and clinical notes, to generate a preference dataset for aligning a lightweight decoder-based text-only LLM (Llama 3.2-3B-Instruct). Despite relying on text input only, the MINT-derived model outperforms models trained with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), or direct preference optimization (DPO), and even outperforms much larger foundation model (Llama 3.1-405B-Instruct). (2) Tissue type classification using cell nucleus images, where MINT uses a vision-language foundation model as the preference generator, containing knowledge learnt from both text and histopathological images to align downstream image-only models. The resulting MINT-derived model significantly improves the performance of Llama 3.2-Vision-11B-Instruct on tissue type classification. In summary, MINT provides an effective strategy to align unimodal LLMs with high-quality multimodal expertise through preference optimization. Our study also highlights a hybrid strategy that grafts the strength of encoder models in classification tasks into large decoder models to enhance reasoning, improve predictive tasks and reduce hallucination in biomedical applications.