Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2609.00959

Candidate-Expanding Routing with Permutation-Stabilized Experts for Mixed-Format Medical VQA

Abstract

Mixed-format medical visual question answering (VQA) requires stable option selection and machine-readable free-text output. The two formats fail differently: multiple-choice predictions can change with option symbols or positions, while clinically plausible open answers can fail automated evaluation when serialization is malformed. We address both challenges with an answer-text memory, a permutation-stabilized vision--language expert, and a sparse candidate- expanding router. The cyclic schedule follows prior work; our contribution is to make expert top-2 a routable candidate alongside memory and expert top-1. On a 1,403-case retrospective internal analysis, this expansion improves a matched binary router from 88.95% to 91.73% (+2.78 percentage points; 95% CI 1.57--3.99), with 56 rescued errors and 17 regressions. Oracle coverage rises from 90.31% to 96.15%, and the final submitted configuration reaches 92.23% on the same retrospective split. For open questions, strict generation and deterministic guards produce 475/475 schema- valid participant-facing outputs without repair, retry, or hard-gate failure. Visual ablations reveal substantial textual dependence. Candidate expansion supplies the principal controlled routing gain; open-path evidence establishes output-contract validity rather than clinical correctness in medical use or deployment.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Hai-Dang Nguyen, Huy-Hieu Pham. 2026-09-01. Candidate-Expanding Routing with Permutation-Stabilized Experts for Mixed-Format Medical VQA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00959

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

Discover connections

Connections use source metadata and explicit phrase matches, not verified experimental comparisons.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Stochastic Optimization of Tree Tensor Networks

Tensor networks, originally developed for quantum many-body physics, are promising models for machine learning. We derive stochastic Riemannian optimizers for tree tensor networks (TTNs) on both their parameter and quotient manifolds, including adaptive and learning-rate-free schemes suitable for minibatch training. Using a hybrid CNN-TTN architecture, we evaluate the methods on Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR10, and Imagenette. The proposed optimizers achieve predictive performance comparable to unconstrained optimization while enabling numerically stable downstream compression.

math.OC

Texture Image Classification Using DWT AlexNet Feature Fusion and Deep Neural Networks

Texture image classification plays a significant role in computer vision applications, including industrial inspection, medical image analysis, remote sensing, and object recognition. Handcrafted features can capture local texture characteristics but may have limited capability to represent complex visual patterns. In contrast, deep learning models automatically learn discriminative representations but may not fully exploit the multiscale spatial-frequency information inherent in texture images. This paper proposes a hybrid feature fusion framework, termed DWT_AlexNet_DNN, which combines Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) features with deep features extracted using AlexNet for texture image classification.

cs.CV

GeBDA: Building Damage Assessment as Text-Based Sequence Prediction

Conventionally, Building Damage Assessment (BDA) is tackled either with dedicated network architectures or by fine-tuning geospatial image foundation models. In this work, we ask whether a general-purpose Vision-Language Model (VLM) can localize buildings and grade their damage through autoregressive sequence generation alone. We cast BDA as predicting a variable-length set of bounding boxes, each specified by its coordinates and a damage label. Our preliminary implementation, based on the open Gemma model, achieves promising damage mapping results from only bi-temporal satellite images and a suitable text prompt.

cs.CV