# VILA-M3: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Medical Expert Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12915 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12915/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 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 45 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Nov 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, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01680/) (2024)
- [Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04652/) (2024)
- [VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07533/) (2023)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15189/) (2023)
- [3D MRI brain tumor segmentation using autoencoder regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11654/) (2018)
- [MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10537/) (2023)
- [Capabilities of Gemini Models in Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18416/) (2024)
- [AgentClinic: a multimodal agent benchmark to evaluate AI in simulated clinical environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07960/) (2024)
- [Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02957/) (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)
- [TorchXRayVision: A library of chest X-ray datasets and models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00595/) (2021)
- [GREEN: Generative Radiology Report Evaluation and Error Notation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03595/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07044/) (2025)
- [NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04468/) (2024)
- [HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09838/) (2025)
- [Med3DVLM: An Efficient Vision-Language Model for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20047/) (2025)
- [DeepMMSearch-R1: Empowering Multimodal LLMs in Multimodal Web Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12801/) (2025)
- [MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00555/) (2025)
- [MedMO: Grounding and Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06965/) (2026)
- [EndoBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Modal Large Language Models for Endoscopy Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23601/) (2025)
- [Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19294/) (2025)
- [Med-CMR: A Fine-Grained Benchmark Integrating Visual Evidence and Clinical Logic for Medical Complex Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00818/) (2025)
- [Think Twice to See More: Iterative Visual Reasoning in Medical VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10052/) (2025)
- [VLMs Need Words: Vision Language Models Ignore Visual Detail In Favor of Semantic Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02486/) (2026)
- [MedSynapse-V: Bridging Visual Perception and Clinical Intuition via Latent Memory Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26283/) (2026)
- [Towards Interactive Global Geolocation Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08907/) (2024)
- [MORALISE: A Structured Benchmark for Moral Alignment in Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14728/) (2025)
- [Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18378/) (2025)
- [RadAgents: Multimodal Agentic Reasoning for Chest X-ray Interpretation with Radiologist-like Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20490/) (2025)
- [MedSAM-Agent: Empowering Interactive Medical Image Segmentation with Multi-turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03320/) (2026)
- [MoMA: A Mixture-of-Multimodal-Agents Architecture for Enhancing Clinical Prediction Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05492/) (2025)
- [On the Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models under Visual Token Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21531/) (2026)
- [Visual Alignment of Medical Vision-Language Models for Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16201/) (2025)
- [MedGround: Bridging the Evidence Gap in Medical Vision-Language Models with Verified Grounding Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06847/) (2026)
- [Can Generalist Vision Language Models (VLMs) Rival Specialist Medical VLMs? Benchmarking and Strategic Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17337/) (2025)
- [MEDVISTAGYM: A Scalable Training Environment for Thinking with Medical Images via Tool-Integrated Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07107/) (2026)
- [Lost in Volume: The CT-SpatialVQA Benchmark for Evaluating Semantic-Spatial Understanding of 3D Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08787/) (2026)
- [Multimodal LLM With Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts for VQA on 3D Brain MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25889/) (2025)
- [A DeepSeek-Powered AI System for Automated Chest Radiograph Interpretation in Clinical Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20344/) (2025)
- [MedObvious: Exposing the Medical Moravec's Paradox in VLMs via Clinical Triage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23501/) (2026)
- [A-IDE : Agent-Integrated Denoising Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16780/) (2025)
- [SpineBench: A Clinically Salient, Level-Aware Benchmark Powered by the SpineMed-450k Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03160/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalist vision language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in computer vision, but they fall short in specialized fields like healthcare, where expert knowledge is essential. In traditional computer vision tasks, creative or approximate answers may be acceptable, but in healthcare, precision is paramount.Current large multimodal models like Gemini and GPT-4o are insufficient for medical tasks due to their reliance on memorized internet knowledge rather than the nuanced expertise required in healthcare. VLMs are usually trained in three stages: vision pre-training, vision-language pre-training, and instruction fine-tuning (IFT). IFT has been typically applied using a mixture of generic and healthcare data. In contrast, we propose that for medical VLMs, a fourth stage of specialized IFT is necessary, which focuses on medical data and includes information from domain expert models. Domain expert models developed for medical use are crucial because they are specifically trained for certain clinical tasks, e.g. to detect tumors and classify abnormalities through segmentation and classification, which learn fine-grained features of medical data-features that are often too intricate for a VLM to capture effectively especially in radiology. This paper introduces a new framework, VILA-M3, for medical VLMs that utilizes domain knowledge via expert models. Through our experiments, we show an improved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with an average improvement of ~9% over the prior SOTA model Med-Gemini and ~6% over models trained on the specific tasks. Our approach emphasizes the importance of domain expertise in creating precise, reliable VLMs for medical applications.