# Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learner

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15189/

## Key facts

- Cited by 392 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10341/) (2022)
- [ClinicalBERT: Modeling Clinical Notes and Predicting Hospital Readmission](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05342/) (2019)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10415/) (2023)
- [PMC-CLIP: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training using Biomedical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07240/) (2023)
- [LinkBERT: Pretraining Language Models with Document Links](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15827/) (2022)
- [Deep Bidirectional Language-Knowledge Graph Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09338/) (2022)
- [CM3: A Causal Masked Multimodal Model of the Internet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07520/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12561/) (2022)
- [Language Models Are An Effective Patient Representation Learning Technique For Electronic Health Record Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05295/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 392)

- [HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08775/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Foundation Models: From Specialists to General-Purpose Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10020/) (2023)
- [Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07044/) (2025)
- [HuatuoGPT-Vision, Towards Injecting Medical Visual Knowledge into Multimodal LLMs at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19280/) (2024)
- [OmniMedVQA: A New Large-Scale Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Medical LVLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09181/) (2024)
- [Towards Generalist Foundation Model for Radiology by Leveraging Web-scale 2D&3D Medical Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02463/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models for Healthcare: from Data, Technology, and Applications to Accountability and Ethics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05694/) (2023)
- [M3D: Advancing 3D Medical Image Analysis with Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00578/) (2024)
- [Med-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Medical Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13939/) (2025)
- [Exploring scalable medical image encoders beyond text supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10815/) (2024)
- [The Emerged Security and Privacy of LLM Agent: A Survey with Case Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19354/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Models for Medical Report Generation and Visual Question Answering: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02469/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models in Medicine: Progress, Application, and Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05112/) (2023)
- [Dolphins: Multimodal Language Model for Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00438/) (2023)
- [HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09838/) (2025)
- [Baichuan-Omni-1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15368/) (2025)
- [MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02483/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models as Analogical Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01714/) (2023)
- [CheXpert Plus: Augmenting a Large Chest X-ray Dataset with Text Radiology Reports, Patient Demographics and Additional Image Formats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19538/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Scientific Large Language Models and Their Applications in Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10833/) (2024)
- [GMAI-MMBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Evaluation Benchmark Towards General Medical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03361/) (2024)
- [Towards Building Multilingual Language Model for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13963/) (2024)
- [Advancing Multimodal Medical Capabilities of Gemini](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03162/) (2024)
- [Quilt-LLaVA: Visual Instruction Tuning by Extracting Localized Narratives from Open-Source Histopathology Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04746/) (2023)
- [MMed-RAG: Versatile Multimodal RAG System for Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13085/) (2024)
- [MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02900/) (2024)
- [Can GPT-4V(ision) Serve Medical Applications? Case Studies on GPT-4V for Multimodal Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09909/) (2023)
- [From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14111/) (2025)
- [Foundational Models in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18689/) (2023)
- [MAIRA-1: A specialised large multimodal model for radiology report generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13668/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medicine, by its nature, is a multifaceted domain that requires the synthesis of information across various modalities. Medical generative vision-language models (VLMs) make a first step in this direction and promise many exciting clinical applications. However, existing models typically have to be fine-tuned on sizeable down-stream datasets, which poses a significant limitation as in many medical applications data is scarce, necessitating models that are capable of learning from few examples in real-time. Here we propose Med-Flamingo, a multimodal few-shot learner adapted to the medical domain. Based on OpenFlamingo-9B, we continue pre-training on paired and interleaved medical image-text data from publications and textbooks. Med-Flamingo unlocks few-shot generative medical visual question answering (VQA) abilities, which we evaluate on several datasets including a novel challenging open-ended VQA dataset of visual USMLE-style problems. Furthermore, we conduct the first human evaluation for generative medical VQA where physicians review the problems and blinded generations in an interactive app. Med-Flamingo improves performance in generative medical VQA by up to 20% in clinician's rating and firstly enables multimodal medical few-shot adaptations, such as rationale generation. We release our model, code, and evaluation app under https://github.com/snap-stanford/med-flamingo.