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
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
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
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
The paper argues that stochastic decoding, common in large language models, is not ideal for Visual Question Answering (VQA) because VQA is a closed‑ended task with head‑heavy answer distributions and epistemic uncertainty. The authors formalize how model calibration relates to predictive accuracy and identify conditions under which greedy decoding is optimal. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show greedy decoding outperforms stochastic sampling, and a new Greedy Decoding for Reasoning Models further improves multimodal reasoning performance.
By Boqi Chen, Xudong Liu, Yunke Ao, Jianing Qiu
arXiv:2605. 18419v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can couple visual perception with open-ended clinical reasoning, making them attractive for computational histopathology.
By Franciskus Xaverius Erick, Johanna Paula M\"uller, Bernhard Kainz