# Dynamic Traceback Learning for Medical Report Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13267/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [Generating Radiology Reports via Memory-driven Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16056/) (2020)
- [CheXbert: Combining Automatic Labelers and Expert Annotations for Accurate Radiology Report Labeling Using BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09167/) (2020)
- [EfficientSAM: Leveraged Masked Image Pretraining for Efficient Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00863/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Memory Networks for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13258/) (2022)
- [Interactive and Explainable Region-guided Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08295/) (2023)
- [SemMAE: Semantic-Guided Masking for Learning Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10207/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Masked Autoencoders Learn Transferable Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14204/) (2022)
- [Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoders for Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07098/) (2022)
- [Multi-modal Understanding and Generation for Medical Images and Text via Vision-Language Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11333/) (2021)
- [Competence-based Multimodal Curriculum Learning for Medical Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14579/) (2022)
- [Radiology Report Generation with a Learned Knowledge Base and Multi-modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15011/) (2021)
- [AlignTransformer: Hierarchical Alignment of Visual Regions and Disease Tags for Medical Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10095/) (2022)
- [Delving into Masked Autoencoders for Multi-Label Thorax Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12843/) (2022)
- [KiUT: Knowledge-injected U-Transformer for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11345/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Prototype Driven Network for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04818/) (2022)
- [A Medical Semantic-Assisted Transformer for Radiographic Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10358/) (2022)
- [ORGAN: Observation-Guided Radiology Report Generation via Tree Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06466/) (2023)
- [MGMAE: Motion Guided Masking for Video Masked Autoencoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10794/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning and Explainability for Automatic Report Generation from Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10563/) (2020)
- [Complex Organ Mask Guided Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02329/) (2023)
- [Multimodal foundation models are better simulators of the human brain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08263/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Medical Report Generation: Disease Revealing Enhancement with Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12526/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MRG-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Clinically Aligned Medical Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16145/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated medical report generation has demonstrated the potential to significantly reduce the workload associated with time-consuming medical reporting. Recent generative representation learning methods have shown promise in integrating vision and language modalities for medical report generation. However, when trained end-to-end and applied directly to medical image-to-text generation, they face two significant challenges: i) difficulty in accurately capturing subtle yet crucial pathological details, and ii) reliance on both visual and textual inputs during inference, leading to performance degradation in zero-shot inference when only images are available. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel multimodal dynamic traceback learning framework (DTrace). Specifically, we introduce a traceback mechanism to supervise the semantic validity of generated content and a dynamic learning strategy to adapt to various proportions of image and text input, enabling text generation without strong reliance on the input from both modalities during inference. The learning of cross-modal knowledge is enhanced by supervising the model to recover masked semantic information from a complementary counterpart. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets, IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR, demonstrate that the proposed DTrace framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods for medical report generation.
