Qin Zhou


2026

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have advanced radiology report generation (RRG), yet two core limitations persist: (1) report-level rewards offer limited evidence-grounded guidance for clinical faithfulness; and (2) current methods lack an explicit self-improving mechanism to align with clinical preference. We introduce clinically aligned Evidence-aware Self-Correcting Reinforcement Learning (ESC-RL), comprising two key components. First, a Group-wise Evidence-aware Alignment Reward (GEAR) delivers group-wise, evidence-aware feedback. GEAR reinforces consistent grounding for true positives, recovers missed findings for false negatives, and suppresses unsupported content for false positives. Second, a Self-correcting Preference Learning (SPL) strategy automatically constructs a reliable, disease-aware preference dataset from multiple noisy observations and leverages an LLM to synthesize refined reports without human supervision. ESC-RL promotes clinically faithful, disease-aligned reward and supports continual self-improvement during training. Extensive experiments on two public chest X-ray datasets demonstrate consistent gains and state-of-the-art performance.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) enables low-cost adaptation of large language models but often suffers from limited representational flexibility. To address this, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design and propose Efficient and Expressive split-path experts that enhance specialization while maintaining low resource overhead. Split-Path Adaptive Representation Mixture-of-Experts (SparMoE) replaces discrete hard routing with a soft routing and fully-activated mixture, enabling stable optimization. Each expert is parameterized as a split-path modulation module, consisting of a scaling path that promotes expert specialization and a bias path that preserves expert-specific signals. This design significantly enhances expressive capacity while maintaining strict parameter efficiency and architectural compatibility with PEFT. Extensive evaluations on GLUE, GSM8K, MBPP, and a text rewriting task from SmolTalk show that our approach consistently outperforms or matches state-of-the-art PEFT methods under comparable parameter budgets, achieving a favorable trade-off between adaptability and efficiency.