Memorization in large language models in medicine prevalence characteristics and implications (opens in new tab)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medicine, with many studies adapting them through continued pretraining or fine-tuning on medical data. However, a key question remains: to what extent do LLMs memorize medical training data—that is, recall or regenerate content seen during continued pretraining or fine-tuning. In this work, we investigate memorization of LLMs in medicine, assessing its prevalence (frequency), characteristics (what is memorized), volume (...