arXiv AI

A Controlled Audit of Pretraining Contamination in Public Medical Vision-Language Benchmarks

arXiv:2606. 10066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical vision-language models (VLMs) are evaluated on public benchmarks whose images and question-answer pairs have been freely downloadable for years, yet reported accuracy assumes these examples were absent from pretraining.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

What Do Medical Vision-Language Models Learn in Radiology? Transfer, Alignment, and Source-Proxy Leakage Under Distribution Shift

The paper investigates how medical vision‑language models (VLMs) behave when faced with distribution shifts such as changes in acquisition domain, supervision, or evaluation protocol. Using datasets like NIH ChestXray14, CheXpert, PadChest, and OpenI, the authors isolate cross‑dataset visual transfer, evaluate multimodal alignment, and quantify source‑proxy leakage in frozen embeddings. They find that self‑supervised visual initialization improves transfer, adversarial adaptation is only marginally helpful, and that multimodal retrieval performance drops under external stress tests while source‑proxy information remains recoverable, highlighting hidden failure modes in medical VLMs.

By Ayoub Louaye Bouaziz, Lokmane Chebouba, Yassine Himeur
arXiv AI
Jul 21

Med-OPD: Improving Medical Vision-Language Models via Evidence-Aware On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2607. 16303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) require reliable reasoning from fine-grained visual evidence, yet existing models can produce plausible clinical answers by relying on language priors or medical templates rather than truly attending to diagnosis-critical regions.

By Yunhang Qian, Jiaquan Yu, Jiawei Liu, Meng Wang, Hongwei Bran Li, Xiaobin Hu
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Why Does Grounding Hurt Medical VQA? Benchmarking, Diagnosis, and Fine-Tuning of Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2604. 27720v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly applied to medical visual question answering (Med-VQA), yet whether they can \emph{localize} the evidence behind their answers---a prerequisite for clinical auditability---is poorly characterized.

By Xupeng Chen, Binbin Shi, Chenqian Le, Qifu Yin, Lang Lin, Haowei Ni, Ran Gong, Panfeng Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Beyond Benchmark Scores: Auditing Medical Vision-Language Models for Chest X-Ray Tuberculosis Screening

The study evaluates the robustness of medical vision‑language models for tuberculosis screening on chest X‑rays by testing them across multiple datasets, prompts, and evaluation settings. Three specialized models (BioMedCLIP, CheXficient, MedSigLIP) and a general OpenCLIP model were audited on 12,200 images, producing 244,000 model–image–prompt scores. Results show that no model consistently outperforms others across all cohorts and reliability criteria, with prompt changes and control group composition significantly affecting AUROC, and that high training‑set performance does not reliably transfer to external cohorts.

By Mushir Akhtar, M. Tanveer, Mohd. Arshad
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 29

SHOVIR: A Benchmark for Evaluating Vision Shortcut Learning in Radiology Report Generation

Current evaluation protocols for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in Radiology Report Generation (RRG) rely on report-level metrics that measure lexical overlap or aggregate clinical correctness. However, such metrics do not test whether individual diagnostic statements stem from the actual pathological evidence visible in the image.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Med-AR: Autoregressive Vision-Language Pretraining for Long-Tailed Chest X-Ray Classification and Uncertainty-Aware Evaluation

Med-AR introduces two autoregressive vision‑language models, Med‑AR‑8B and Med‑AR‑2B, pretrained on structured radiology reports, abnormality‑focused text, and region annotations to address long‑tailed chest X‑ray classification. The models outperform existing contrastive, self‑supervised, and supervised encoders—including Med‑CLIP, CheXFound, EVA‑Base, ARK, and BioViL‑T—across PadChest, MIMIC‑CXR, and CheXpert, achieving higher mean AUROC and AUPRC for head, medium, and tail findings and lower excess area under the risk‑coverage curve. Med‑AR also demonstrates improved selective‑prediction performance, with Med‑AR‑8B raising tail‑label mean AUPRC on MIMIC‑CXR from 0.1033 to 0.1441 and Med‑AR‑2B delivering the strongest discrimination on PadChest.

By Janhavi Prabhu, Sahil, Akshay V, Shivam Shukla, Manoj Tadepalli, Preetham Putha