Recent development of large language models (LLMs) has exhibited impressive zero-shot proficiency on generic and common sense questions. However, LLMs' application on domain-specific vertical questions still lags behind, primarily due to the humiliation problems and deficiencies in vertical knowledge. Furthermore, the vertical data annotation process often requires labor-intensive expert involvement, thereby presenting an additional challenge in enhancing the model's vertical capabilities. In this paper, we propose SERVAL, a synergy learning pipeline designed for unsupervised development of vertical capabilities in both LLMs and small models by mutual enhancement. Specifically, SERVAL utilizes the LLM's zero-shot outputs as annotations, leveraging its confidence to teach a robust vertical model from scratch. Reversely, the trained vertical model guides the LLM fine-tuning to enhance its zero-shot capability, progressively improving both models through an iterative process. In medical domain, known for complex vertical knowledge and costly annotations, comprehensive experiments show that, without access to any gold labels, SERVAL with the synergy learning of OpenAI GPT-3.5 and a simple model attains fully-supervised competitive performance across ten widely used medical datasets. These datasets represent vertically specialized medical diagnostic scenarios (e.g., diabetes, heart diseases, COVID-19), highlighting the potential of SERVAL in refining the vertical capabilities of LLMs and training vertical models from scratch, all achieved without the need for annotations.

Transfer learning which aims at utilizing knowledge learned from one problem (source domain) to solve another different but related problem (target domain) has attracted wide research attentions. However, the current transfer learning methods are mostly uninterpretable, especially to people without ML expertise. In this extended abstract, we brief introduce two knowledge graph (KG) based frameworks towards human understandable transfer learning explanation. The first one explains the transferability of features learned by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) from one domain to another through pre-training and fine-tuning, while the second justifies the model of a target domain predicted by models from multiple source domains in zero-shot learning (ZSL). Both methods utilize KG and its reasoning capability to provide rich and human understandable explanations to the transfer procedure.