arXiv AI

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

arXiv:2606. 19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice.

arXiv AI
Jun 30

IMCBench: A benchmark for multimodal LLMs in Image-grounded Medical Conversations

arXiv:2606. 28556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large language models and vision-language models have enabled reasoning over multimodal data, offering opportunities for clinical applications such as decision support and triaging.

By Maria Xenochristou, Ashutosh Joshi, Korosh Vatanparvar, Mohammad Abuzar Hashemi, Prasad Kasu, Deepak Bansal, Anchal Nema, Nivedita Wadhwa, Prashams S Jain, Rebecca Abraham, Will Kimbrough, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Wilko Schulz-Mahlendorf
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

PROVE: Proof-guided Regime-aware Operator Verification for Hallucination Detection in Medical Visual Question Answering

PROVE is a black‑box hallucination detector for medical visual question answering that tailors its verification strategy to each question’s evidential structure. It classifies questions into three regimes, activates a subset of five operators per regime, and calibrates operator importance using deterministic question‑answer features to produce a risk score. On 8048 test samples across three medical VQA benchmarks and four state‑of‑the‑art vision‑language models, PROVE achieves an AUROC of 0.821, surpassing the best baseline by 0.159 with consistent improvements across all models and datasets.

By Keyang Zhou, Siyi Li, Zhongnan Shi, Qichao Ying, Wei Tang, Zhenxing Qian
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Evaluating Multi-Turn Multimodal Diagnostic Reasoning on Challenging Real-World Clinical Cases

arXiv:2607. 25933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinical diagnostic evaluation should not only assess whether models can provide correct diagnoses, but also reflect the realities of clinical practice, including progressive disclosure of multimodal information, dynamic updating of diagnostic hypotheses, and continuous refinement of clinical reasoning.

By Rui Yang, Weihao Xuan, Yi Lin, Zhuhan Bao, Jonathan Chong Kai Liew, Matthew Yu Heng Wong, Nicol\'as Lescano, Nikita R. Paripati, Emily Ling-Lin Pai, Jiarui Liu, Heli Qi, Heng-Jui Chang, Benny Kai Guo Loo, Huitao Li, Kunyu Yu, Yufan Wang, Chuan Hong, Shijian Lu, Douglas Teodoro, Naoto Yokoya, Ross Koppel, Mona Diab, Hua Xu, David W. Bates, Nan Liu, Yifan Peng
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

Just how sure are you? Improving Verbalized Uncertainty Calibration in Medical VQA

arXiv:2606. 27023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) applied to Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) tend to produce overconfident outputs regardless of actual correctness, and existing verbalized confidence calibration methods, developed primarily for text only LLMs, do not account for the multimodal nature of medical image understanding.

By Eren Senoglu, Federico Toschi, Nicolo Brunello, Andrea Sassella, Mark James Carman
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

MedProb: Probing Internal Representations of Vision-Language Models for Medical Question Answering

MedProb is a lightweight probing framework that predicts multiple-choice medical visual question answering (Med‑VQA) answers directly from frozen vision‑language model (VLM) representations, avoiding free‑text generation. On datasets such as PATH‑VQA, SLAKE, and VQA‑RAD, MedProb extracts more answer‑relevant signal than prompting and outperforms both medical VLMs and agentic systems. The approach also narrows the performance gap between small and large models, shows that medical adaptation does not consistently improve linear decodability, and reveals positional biases in both prompting and generation.

By Erfan Nourbakhsh, Ke Yang, Anthony Rios
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Uncertainty Is Not a Safety Net for Clinical VQA, but Can It Anticipate Model Failure?

The paper evaluates uncertainty estimation (UE) methods for clinical vision‑language models (VLMs) on visual question answering (VQA). Across 8 UE techniques and 12 VLMs, UE quality tracks model accuracy, degrading where performance is weakest, and fails to signal uncertainty when models are stressed by hiding the correct answer (NOTA perturbations). However, UE on unperturbed inputs reliably predicts which predictions will collapse under NOTA, suggesting UE can diagnose model fragility.

By Arnisa Fazla, Alberto Testoni, Ameen Abu-Hanna, Barbara Plank, Iacer Calixto
arXiv AI
Sep 17

A visual large language foundational model for medical image recognition using clinician-contributed online resources

The paper introduces ThoughtMed-1M, a large-scale medical visual question answering dataset built from de‑identified images and clinician‑generated commentaries, designed to capture structured clinical reasoning and image‑text alignment. Using this dataset, the authors train FOLTMed, a foundational large language model that achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on 42 medical VQA benchmarks, with a macro accuracy of 85.4% and improved factuality and similarity metrics over existing models.

By Lingxuan Hou, Yuhua Xie, Yue Hu, Yan Zhuang, Junqi Li, Chengzhi Xia, Binh Phu Nguyen, Abubakar Siddique, Minh Nguyen, Yao Hou, Yanju Bao, Kexin Liu, Ke Chen, Jianjun Sun, Zeqi Li, Trung Nguyen, Jiangli Lin
arXiv AI
Aug 28

From Reasoning to Pixels: Grounded Medical Multimodal LLMs for VQA and Segmentation

The paper introduces MedREAL, a unified framework that aligns linguistic reasoning with spatial grounding for medical visual question answering and segmentation. MedREAL employs Seg Anchored Reasoning Pooling (SARP) to extract semantic evidence from segmentation tokens and a Reasoning-to-Visual (R2V) fusion mechanism to integrate these features into a segmentation pipeline. Using the newly created MedRAVS-13K dataset, MedREAL achieves superior performance, reporting 68.49% gIoU and 70.47% cIoU, and generates evidence masks that consistently match textual diagnoses.

By Haowen Gu, Gensheng Pei, Junzhu Mao, Qiong Wang, Mingwu Ren, Yazhou Yao