arXiv AI

Analyzing and Mitigating Cross-Lingual Degradation in Multilingual Medical VQA

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
Aug 25

Benchmarking and Boosting Multilingual Capabilities of LVLMs via OCR-Centric Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces PM4Bench, a multimodal, multilingual, multi-task benchmark built on a strictly parallel 10‑language corpus, allowing fair cross‑lingual comparison of Large Vision‑Language Models (LVLMs). It also proposes a vision setting that embeds textual inputs directly into images to better mimic real deployment scenarios. Experiments show OCR performance drives cross‑lingual gaps, leading to an OCR‑centric GRPO training strategy that improves multilingual VQA and reduces disparities without costly supervision.

By Junyuan Gao, Jiahe Song, Jiang Wu, Runchuan Zhu, Guanlin Shen, Shasha Wang, Xingjian Wei, Haote Yang, Weijia Li, Bin Wang, Lijun Wu, Conghui He
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Bridging the English-Arabic Medical Knowledge Gap: Targeted Low-Rank Adaptation via Causal Layer Selection

arXiv:2608.00207v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform strongly in English medical tasks but degrade substantially in Arabic, a gap widely attributed to limited trai...

By Chaimae Abouzahir, Musa Khan, Hala Ali-Hassan, Congbo Ma, Khaled Saleh, Yousra Sadqi, Jihad Mallat, Walid Al-Eisawi, Nizar Habash, Farah E. Shamout
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 21

HealMed: Multilingual Evaluation of Large Language Models in Medicine

arXiv:2608. 19981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HealMed, an expert-reviewed benchmark for multilingual evaluation of large language models in medicine.

By Yingjian Chen (Drew), Fan Gao (Drew), Sherry T. Tong (Drew), Haoyu Zhang (Drew), Aosong Feng (Drew), Kevin W. Jin (Drew), Xing Wu (Drew), Jinghui Lu (Drew), Abdul Samad (Drew), Akbar Faruqi (Drew), Cesar Caraballo (Drew), Cibele Brand\~ao (Drew), Dhruva (Drew), Gupta, Eunji Jeon, Gabriel Madera-Santiago, Geon Lee, Hugo Toshio Itikawa, Insook Cho, Isabelli Martins, Isarar Siddique, Israr Ahmed, Jihyo Kwak, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Luis Guilherme Cardoso, Minjin Kim, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Renee Dua, Santiago Gudi\~no-Rosales, Xiujie Chen, Zeo Lapalus, Zixin Xu, Michihiro Yasunaga, Rex Ying, Heuiseok Lim, Jaewoo Kang, Chanjun Park, Hang Jiang, Ethan Goh, Hyunjae Kim, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Qingyu Chen, Irene Li
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