Alex James Boyd


2025

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Focus on What Matters: Enhancing Medical Vision-Language Models with Automatic Attention Alignment Tuning
Aofei Chang | Le Huang | Alex James Boyd | Parminder Bhatia | Taha Kass-Hout | Cao Xiao | Fenglong Ma
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Medical Large Vision-Language Models (Med-LVLMs) often exhibit suboptimal attention distribution on visual inputs, leading to hallucinated or inaccurate outputs. Existing methods primarily rely on inference-time interventions, which are limited in attention adaptation or require additional supervision. To address this, we propose A3Tune, a novel fine-tuning framework for Automatic Attention Alignment Tuning. ATune leverages zero-shot weak labels from SAM, refines them into prompt-aware labels using BioMedCLIP, and then selectively modifies visually-critical attention heads to improve alignment while minimizing interference. Additionally, we introduce a A3MoE module, enabling adaptive parameter selection for attention tuning across diverse prompts and images. Extensive experiments on medical VQA and report generation benchmarks show that A3Tune outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving enhanced attention distributions and performance in Med-LVLMs.