MLeVLM: Improve Multi-level Progressive Capabilities based on Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Visual Question Answering

Dexuan Xu, Yanyuan Chen, Jieyi Wang, Yue Huang, Hanpin Wang, Zhi Jin, Hongxing Wang, Weihua Yue, Jing He, Hang Li, Yu Huang


Abstract
Medical visual question answering (MVQA) requires in-depth understanding of medical images and questions to provide reliable answers. We summarize multi-level progressive capabilities that models need to focus on in MVQA: recognition, details, diagnosis, knowledge, and reasoning. Existing MVQA models tend to ignore the above capabilities due to unspecific data and plain architecture. To address these issues, this paper proposes Multi-level Visual Language Model (MLeVLM) for MVQA. On the data side, we construct a high-quality multi-level instruction dataset MLe-VQA via GPT-4, which covers multi-level questions and answers as well as reasoning processes from visual clues to semantic cognition. On the architecture side, we propose a multi-level feature alignment module, including attention-based token selector and context merger, which can efficiently align features at different levels from visual to semantic. To better evaluate the model’s capabilities, we manually construct a multi-level MVQA evaluation benchmark named MLe-Bench. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our constructed multi-level instruction dataset and the multi-level feature alignment module. It also proves that MLeVLM outperforms existing medical multimodal large language models.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.296
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
4977–4997
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.296
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Cite (ACL):
Dexuan Xu, Yanyuan Chen, Jieyi Wang, Yue Huang, Hanpin Wang, Zhi Jin, Hongxing Wang, Weihua Yue, Jing He, Hang Li, and Yu Huang. 2024. MLeVLM: Improve Multi-level Progressive Capabilities based on Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Visual Question Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 4977–4997, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MLeVLM: Improve Multi-level Progressive Capabilities based on Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Visual Question Answering (Xu et al., Findings 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.findings-acl.296.pdf