# Enhancing Abnormality Grounding for Vision Language Models with Knowledge Descriptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03278 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03278/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 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 25 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06242/) (2023)
- [Making the Most of Text Semantics to Improve Biomedical Vision--Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09817/) (2022)
- [PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10415/) (2023)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)
- [VinDr-CXR: An open dataset of chest X-rays with radiologist's annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15029/) (2020)
- [DaViT: Dual Attention Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03645/) (2022)
- [MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04449/) (2024)
- [Interactive and Explainable Region-guided Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08295/) (2023)
- [From Show to Tell: A Survey on Deep Learning-based Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06912/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Medical Visual Question Answering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10056/) (2021)
- [Chest ImaGenome Dataset for Clinical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00316/) (2021)
- [Toward Visual Grounding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20206/) (2024)
- [PadChest-GR: A Bilingual Chest X-ray Dataset for Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05085/) (2024)
- [RadVLM: A Multitask Conversational Vision-Language Model for Radiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03333/) (2025)
- [ChEX: Interactive Localization and Region Description in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15770/) (2024)
- [Ultrasound Report Generation with Cross-Modality Feature Alignment via Unsupervised Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00644/) (2024)
- [A Self-Guided Framework for Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09378/) (2022)
- [Robust Detection Outcome: A Metric for Pathology Detection in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01920/) (2023)
- [Language Models Meet Anomaly Detection for Better Interpretability and Generalizability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07622/) (2024)

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

- [MedReasoner: Reinforcement Learning Drives Reasoning Grounding from Clinical Thought to Pixel-Level Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08177/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in visual grounding tasks. However, their effectiveness in the medical domain, particularly for abnormality detection and localization within medical images, remains underexplored. A major challenge is the complex and abstract nature of medical terminology, which makes it difficult to directly associate pathological anomaly terms with their corresponding visual features. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to enhance VLM performance in medical abnormality detection and localization by leveraging decomposed medical knowledge. Instead of directly prompting models to recognize specific abnormalities, we focus on breaking down medical concepts into fundamental attributes and common visual patterns. This strategy promotes a stronger alignment between textual descriptions and visual features, improving both the recognition and localization of abnormalities in medical images.We evaluate our method on the 0.23B Florence-2 base model and demonstrate that it achieves comparable performance in abnormality grounding to significantly larger 7B LLaVA-based medical VLMs, despite being trained on only 1.5% of the data used for such models. Experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in both known and previously unseen abnormalities, suggesting its strong generalization capabilities.