# Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Medical Multimodal Large Language Models for Medical Visual Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23822 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23822/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 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 14 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 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, 14 of 14)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [MiniGPT-v2: large language model as a unified interface for vision-language multi-task learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09478/) (2023)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [Making the Most of Text Semantics to Improve Biomedical Vision--Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09817/) (2022)
- [MedKLIP: Medical Knowledge Enhanced Language-Image Pre-Training in Radiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02228/) (2023)
- [A Systematic Evaluation of GPT-4V's Multimodal Capability for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20381/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised vision-language pretraining for Medical visual question answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13594/) (2022)
- [Masked Vision and Language Pre-training with Unimodal and Multimodal Contrastive Losses for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05314/) (2023)
- [Multimodal self-supervised learning for lesion localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01524/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Toward Visual Grounding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20206/) (2024)
- [Distributed LLMs and Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey on Advances, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16585/) (2025)
- [Seeing the Trees for the Forest: Rethinking Weakly-Supervised Medical Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15123/) (2025)
- [ClinKD: Cross-Modal Clinical Knowledge Distiller For Multi-Task Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05928/) (2025)
- [Multi-label Instance-level Generalised Visual Grounding in Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06699/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Medical Visual Grounding via Knowledge-guided Spatial Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01915/) (2026)
- [GLeVE: Graph-Guided Lesion Grounding with Proposal Verification in 3D CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22619/) (2026)
- [Is ChatGPT-5 Ready for Mammogram VQA?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11628/) (2025)
- [OneFocus: Enabling Real-World X-ray Security Screening with a Unified Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15663/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inherit the superior text understanding capabilities of LLMs and extend these capabilities to multimodal scenarios. These models achieve excellent results in the general domain of multimodal tasks. However, in the medical domain, the substantial training costs and the requirement for extensive medical data pose challenges to the development of medical MLLMs. Furthermore, due to the free-text form of answers, tasks such as visual grounding that need to produce output in a prescribed form become difficult for MLLMs. So far, there have been no medical MLLMs works in medical visual grounding area. For the medical vision grounding task, which involves identifying locations in medical images based on short text descriptions, we propose Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning medical multimodal large language models for Medcial Visual Grounding (PFMVG). To validate the performance of the model, we evaluate it on a public benchmark dataset for medical visual grounding, where it achieves competitive results, and significantly outperforming GPT-4v. Our code will be open sourced after peer review.