arXiv AI

Gated Prototype Transfer for Zero-Support Medical Vision Language Model

The paper introduces Gated Knowledge‑Guided Prototype Transfer (GProtoT), a training‑free module that enhances zero‑support medical vision‑language models by transferring visual residuals from supported classes to missing ones using VLM similarity and clinical ontology distances. GProtoT employs an evidence gate to scale transfer based on semantic relevance, reducing negative transfer while modestly improving recall and accuracy in realistic one‑shot trials on MESSIDOR. The method requires no gradients, validation data, or extra inference, offering a low‑compute, accountable adaptation path for incomplete clinical supervision.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Explainable Diabetic Retinopathy Classification Using Vision Foundation Models

The paper presents an explainable diabetic retinopathy classification framework that leverages vision foundation models—DINOv2, CLIP, and Vision Transformer—combined with various transfer learning techniques such as full fine‑tuning, linear probing, and Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Using the ODIR dataset for internal validation and the APTOS dataset for external testing, DINOv2‑LoRA achieved the best internal AUROC (0.758) while DINOv2 and ViT full fine‑tuning reached the highest external AUROC (0.920). Explainability was assessed with Grad‑CAM and HiResCAM against expert‑annotated lesion masks from IDRiD, using Dice, IoU, and Pointing Game metrics, confirming that model attention aligns with clinically relevant retinal lesions.

By Abhishek Verma, Anila Krishna, Abhishek Gajanan Bankar, Juan Miguel Lopez Alcaraz
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
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
Oct 5

Safeguarding Mutual Correction in Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Cut Statistics

The paper introduces SafeCut, a method for Source-Free Domain Adaptation that uses Vision‑Language models as external knowledge. SafeCut employs a cut statistic to gauge prediction reliability, enabling a dynamic, reliability‑gated supervision between the source‑pretrained model and the ViL model. This approach selectively amplifies correct mutual corrections while suppressing error propagation, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on multiple SFDA benchmarks.

By Seongjun Lee, Changhee Lee
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