# Advancing High Resolution Vision-Language Models in Biomedicine

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09454 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09454/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 22 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Medical vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/medical-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10341/) (2022)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10286/) (2020)
- [SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09542/) (2021)
- [Mini-Gemini: Mining the Potential of Multi-modality Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18814/) (2024)
- [MedAlpaca -- An Open-Source Collection of Medical Conversational AI Models and Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08247/) (2023)
- [MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09611/) (2024)
- [DoctorGLM: Fine-tuning your Chinese Doctor is not a Herculean Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01097/) (2023)
- [Masked Image Modeling Advances 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11716/) (2022)
- [When Do We Not Need Larger Vision Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13043/) (2024)
- [Open-Ended Medical Visual Question Answering Through Prefix Tuning of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05977/) (2023)
- [Q2ATransformer: Improving Medical VQA via an Answer Querying Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01611/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised vision-language pretraining for Medical visual question answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13594/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [HiRED: Attention-Guided Token Dropping for Efficient Inference of High-Resolution Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10945/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Driven Expert Control: Enhancing the Reliability of Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09209/) (2025)
- [The Patient is not a Moving Document: A World Model Training Paradigm for Longitudinal EHR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22128/) (2026)
- [OrthoInsight: Rib Fracture Diagnosis and Report Generation Based on Multi-Modal Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13993/) (2025)
- [The Impact of Image Resolution on Biomedical Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18304/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal learning has significantly advanced generative AI, especially in vision-language modeling. Innovations like GPT-4V and open-source projects such as LLaVA have enabled robust conversational agents capable of zero-shot task completions. However, applying these technologies in the biomedical field presents unique challenges. Recent initiatives like LLaVA-Med have started to adapt instruction-tuning for biomedical contexts using large datasets such as PMC-15M. Our research offers three key contributions: (i) we present a new instruct dataset enriched with medical image-text pairs from Claude3-Opus and LLaMA3 70B, (ii) we propose a novel image encoding strategy using hierarchical representations to improve fine-grained biomedical visual comprehension, and (iii) we develop the Llama3-Med model, which achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on biomedical visual question answering benchmarks, with an average performance improvement of over 10% compared to previous methods. These advancements provide more accurate and reliable tools for medical professionals, bridging gaps in current multi-modal conversational assistants and promoting further innovations in medical AI.
