arXiv AI

Breaking Failure Cascades: Step-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Medical Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 31825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models have shown great promise in clinical image reasoning, but existing post-training pipelines remain predominantly outcome-centric, relying on final answer correctness or sequence-level preferences.

arXiv AI
Jul 1

Token-Sparse Medical Multimodal Reasoning via Dual-Stream Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 31599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) combining reinforcement learning (RL) ignite remarkable progress in multimodal reasoning, yet still struggle with medical images, which typically exhibit extremely sparse visual evidence to inform clinical decision-making.

By Kaitao Chen, Weiqian Zhao, Jiamin Wu, Qihao Zheng, Shangquan Sun, Chunfeng Song, Xiaosong Wang, Mu Zhou, Mianxin Liu
arXiv AI
Jul 21

MedLVR: Latent Visual Reasoning for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering

arXiv:2604. 09757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Medical vision--language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for medical visual question answering (VQA), yet their reasoning remains largely text-centric: images are encoded once as static context, and subsequent inference is dominated by language.

By Suyang Xi, Songtao Hu, Yuxiang Lai, Wangyun Dan, Yaqi Liu, Shansong Wang, Xiaofeng Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 12

CARE: Confidence-Aware Reasoning for Reliable Medical VQA

arXiv:2608. 10964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) has enabled medical Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to produce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for visual question answering, yet these models suffer from $\textit{confidence miscalibration}$---a systematic gap between expressed certainty and actual diagnostic accuracy that undermines clinical trust.

By Yuetian Du, Yucheng Wang, Zhenyuan Chen, Luyuan Chen, Rongyu Zhang, Jinjian Zhang, Wei Zhou, Zhijie Xu, Ming Kong, Zhan Zhou, Jie Liu, Qiang Zhu
arXiv AI
Jul 14

SVR-R1: Bootstrapping Multi-modal Reasoning with Self-verification in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 10966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Self-Verified Reasoner (SVR-R1), a multi-turn RL framework that turns a model's own verification into a learning signal for multimodal reasoning.

By Mingyuan Wu, Jingcheng Yang, Shengyi Qian, Xudong Wang, Jize Jiang, Qifan Wang, Aashu Singh, Khoi Pham, Fei Liu, Zhaolun Su, Zhuokai Zhao, Klara Nahrstedt, Jianyu Wang, Hanchao Yu
arXiv AI
3d ago

From Compound Figures to Medical Multi-image Reasoning: Scaling Multimodal Large Language Models with Biomedical Literature

arXiv:2511.22232v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly capable in medical imaging, yet most focus on single-image settings. Clinical inter...

By Zhen Chen, Yihang Fu, Rong Zhou, Serina Applebaum, Min Kyu Kim, Aidan Gilson, Morten Lee, Salahudeen Mirza, Gabriel Madera, Mauro Giuffre, Yuanting Pan, Roy Jiang, Hyunjae Kim, Hua Xu, Qingyu Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Beyond Final Answers: CRYSTAL Benchmark for Transparent Multimodal Reasoning Evaluation

CRYSTAL is a diagnostic benchmark comprising 6,372 multimodal reasoning instances that assess models through verifiable intermediate steps. It introduces two metrics—Match F1 and Ordered Match F1—to evaluate step-level precision, recall, and order. The benchmark, built via a Delphi-inspired pipeline with four independent MLLMs, reveals systematic failures in current models, such as cherry‑picking and disordered reasoning, and proposes a Causal Process Reward and CPR‑Curriculum to improve reasoning performance.

By Wayner Barrios, SouYoung Jin
arXiv AI
Sep 21

LiteMedCoT-VL: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation for Medical Visual Question Answering

LiteMedCoT-VL is a parameter‑efficient pipeline that transfers chain‑of‑thought reasoning from a 235B teacher model to a 2B student model using LoRA fine‑tuning on explanation‑enriched data. The approach enables a compact vision‑language model to perform medical visual question answering without relying on image captions, achieving 64.9% accuracy on the PMC‑VQA benchmark—an 11‑point improvement over the zero‑shot Qwen3‑VL‑4B baseline. Visual grounding analysis confirms that the model bases its predictions on image content rather than textual priors.

By Runze Ma, Shunbo Jia, Haonan Lyu, Guo Liu, Caizhi Liao
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Evo-PI: Aligning Medical Reasoning via Evolving Principle-Guided Supervision

arXiv:2606. 31800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite recent progress, the reasoning capabilities of large multimodal language models (MLLMs) remain fundamentally constrained by static supervision, where fixed prompts, rules, or reward models provide non-adaptive guidance throughout training.

By Xianda Zheng, Huan Gao, Meng-Fen Chiang, Michael Witbrock, Kaiqi Zhao, Shangyang Li
arXiv AI
Jun 11

OpenMedReason: Scientific Reasoning Supervision for Medical Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 12169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-stakes clinical use of large vision-language models (LVLMs) requires reasoning that is grounded in visual evidence and clinical knowledge, not just correct final answers.

By Negin Baghbanzadeh, Pritam Sarkar, Michael Colacci, Abeer Badawi, Adibvafa Fallahpour, Arash Afkanpour, Leonid Sigal, Ali Etemad, Elham Dolatabadi