mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

QoQ-Med: Building Multimodal Clinical Foundation Models with Domain-Aware GRPO Training

arXiv 2506.00711 ↗First posted 31 May 2025cs.LG cs.AI cs.CVcited by 38

On the map: LLM reasoning → Clinical and biomedical applications

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Clinical decision-making routinely demands reasoning over heterogeneous data, yet existing multimodal language models (MLLMs) remain largely vision-centric and fail to generalize across clinical specialties. To bridge this gap, we introduce QoQ-Med-7B/32B, the first open generalist clinical foundation model that jointly reasons across medical images, time-series signals, and text reports. QoQ-Med is trained with Domain-aware Relative Policy Optimization (DRPO), a novel reinforcement-learning objective that hierarchically scales normalized rewards according to domain rarity and modality difficulty, mitigating performance imbalance caused by skewed clinical data distributions. Trained on 2.61 million instruction tuning pairs spanning 9 clinical domains, we show that DRPO training boosts diagnostic performance by 43% in macro-F1 on average across all visual domains as compared to other critic-free training methods like GRPO. Furthermore, with QoQ-Med trained on intensive segmentation data, it is able to highlight salient regions related to the diagnosis, with an IoU 10x higher than open models while reaching the performance of OpenAI o4-mini. To foster reproducibility and downstream research, we release (i) the full model weights, (ii) the modular training pipeline, and (iii) all intermediate reasoning traces at https://github.com/DDVD233/QoQ_Med.

Key facts. Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 50 of its 97 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 May 2025.

Builds on

50 of 97 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Med-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Medical Reasoning in Vision-Language Models18 Mar
  2. 2025Med-RLVR: Emerging Medical Reasoning from a 3B base model via reinforcement Learning27 Feb
  3. 2025MedVLM-R1: Incentivizing Medical Reasoning Capability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) via Reinforcement Learning26 Feb
  4. 2024MediQ: Question-Asking LLMs and a Benchmark for Reliable Interactive Clinical Reasoning3 Jun

Other references · 46

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  2. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  4. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
  5. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  6. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  7. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  8. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,912
  9. 2019Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferencescited by 2,150
  10. 2019CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparisoncited by 1,423
  11. 2023LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Daycited by 1,305
  12. 2019PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answeringcited by 1,288
34 more
  1. 2018IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architecturescited by 883
  2. 2019MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographscited by 597
  3. 2022Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 596
  4. 2023Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learnercited by 392
  5. 2023PMC-VQA: Visual Instruction Tuning for Medical Visual Question Answeringcited by 338
  6. 2020VinDr-CXR: An open dataset of chest X-rays with radiologist's annotationscited by 239
  7. 2023BiomedGPT: A Generalist Vision-Language Foundation Model for Diverse Biomedical Taskscited by 201
  8. 2023ReMax: A Simple, Effective, and Efficient Reinforcement Learning Method for Aligning Large Language Modelscited by 187
  9. 2020A Patient-Centric Dataset of Images and Metadata for Identifying Melanomas Using Clinical Contextcited by 146
  10. 2018Multi-task Deep Reinforcement Learning with PopArtcited by 141
  11. 2023Scaling Laws for Generative Mixed-Modal Language Modelscited by 134
  12. 2017PubMed 200k RCT: a Dataset for Sequential Sentence Classification in Medical Abstractscited by 124
  13. 2022Modality Competition: What Makes Joint Training of Multi-modal Network Fail in Deep Learning? (Provably)cited by 122
  14. 2020PAD-UFES-20: a skin lesion dataset composed of patient data and clinical images collected from smartphonescited by 118
  15. 2022Foundations and Trends in Multimodal Machine Learning: Principles, Challenges, and Open Questionscited by 116
  16. 2023The KiTS21 Challenge: Automatic segmentation of kidneys, renal tumors, and renal cysts in corticomedullary-phase CTcited by 103
  17. 2020COVID-19 Image Data Collectioncited by 101
  18. 2024GMAI-MMBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Evaluation Benchmark Towards General Medical AIcited by 96
  19. 2022Brain Network Transformercited by 94
  20. 2019Lung and Colon Cancer Histopathological Image Dataset (LC25000)cited by 89
  21. 2020Interpretability of machine learning based prediction models in healthcarecited by 75
  22. 2022BrainGB: A Benchmark for Brain Network Analysis with Graph Neural Networkscited by 75
  23. 2024CARES: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Trustworthiness in Medical Vision Language Modelscited by 64
  24. 2022A Multifaceted Benchmarking of Synthetic Electronic Health Record Generation Modelscited by 43
  25. 2023Efficient RLHF: Reducing the Memory Usage of PPOcited by 40
  26. 2025GEM: Empowering MLLM for Grounded ECG Understanding with Time Series and Imagescited by 39
  27. 2022Deep Multi-modal Fusion of Image and Non-image Data in Disease Diagnosis and Prognosis: A Reviewcited by 37
  28. 2023INSPECT: A Multimodal Dataset for Pulmonary Embolism Diagnosis and Prognosiscited by 27
  29. 2024Biomedical Visual Instruction Tuning with Clinician Preference Alignmentcited by 21
  30. 2024HEMM: Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Foundation Modelscited by 21
  31. 2024Learning General Representation of 12-Lead Electrocardiogram with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecturecited by 19
  32. 2021COVIDx-US -- An open-access benchmark dataset of ultrasound imaging data for AI-driven COVID-19 analyticscited by 17
  33. 2024Reward Centeringcited by 16
  34. 2025CLIMB: Data Foundations for Large Scale Multimodal Clinical Foundation Modelscited by 13

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 9; 2026: 29.

38 papers.

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  1. 2025Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontierscited by 199
  2. 2025OctoMed: Data Recipes for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Medical Reasoningcited by 10
  3. 2026ECG-R1: Protocol-Guided and Modality-Agnostic MLLM for Reliable ECG Interpretationcited by 9
  4. 2026MDAgent2: Large Language Model for Code Generation and Knowledge Q&A in Molecular Dynamicscited by 7
  5. 2025Bridging the Gap in Ophthalmic AI: MM-Retinal-Reason Dataset and OphthaReason Model toward Dynamic Multimodal Reasoningcited by 6
  6. 2026MedVR: Annotation-Free Medical Visual Reasoning via Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  7. 2025UniECG: Understanding and Generating ECG in One Unified Modelcited by 4
  8. 2025PETAR: Localized Findings Generation with Mask-Aware Vision-Language Modeling for PET Automated Reportingcited by 4
  9. 2025Rethinking Test-Time Scaling for Medical AI: Model and Task-Aware Strategies for LLMs and VLMscited by 3
  10. 2026When Does RL Help Medical VLMs? Disentangling Vision, SFT, and RL Gainscited by 3
  11. 2025Automated Structured Radiology Report Generation with Rich Clinical Contextcited by 2
  12. 2026Visual Memory Injection Attacks for Multi-Turn Conversationscited by 2
26 more
  1. 2026CTM-AI: A Blueprint for General AI Inspired by a Model of Consciousnesscited by 2
  2. 2026Regulating Anatomy-Aware Rewards via Trajectory-Integral Feedback for Volumetric Computed Tomography Analysiscited by 2
  3. 2026Scaling Participation in Modular AI Systemscited by 2
  4. 2026Breaking Failure Cascades: Step-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Medical Multimodal Reasoningcited by 2
  5. 2025The Alignment Paradox of Medical Large Language Models in Infertility Care: Decoupling Algorithmic Improvement from Clinical Decision-making Qualitycited by 1
  6. 2026SurGo-R1: Benchmarking and Modeling Contextual Reasoning for Operative Zone in Surgical Videocited by 1
  7. 2026Seeing Beyond 8bits: Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of HDR-UGC Videoscited by 1
  8. 2026A Multi-Dataset Benchmark of Multiple Instance Learning for 3D Neuroimage Classificationcited by 1
  9. 2026PaperFit: Vision-in-the-Loop Typesetting Optimization for Scientific Documentscited by 1
  10. 2026Not All Tokens Matter Equally: Dynamic In-context Vector Distillation with Decisive-Token Supervision for Long-form Medical Report Generationcited by 1
  11. 2026Aligning Clinical Needs and AI Capabilities: A Survey on LLMs for Medical Reasoningcited by 1
  12. 2025EQPO: Equitable Group Relative Policy Optimization for Clinical Reasoningcited by 0
  13. 2026A Vision for Multisensory Intelligence: Sensing, Science, and Synergycited by 0
  14. 2026MedGPT-oss: Training a General-Purpose Vision-Language Model for Biomedicinecited by 0
  15. 2026AgroOmni: A Large-Scale Multi-view Agricultural Dataset for Cross-Scale Multimodal Reasoningcited by 0
  16. 2026When Minor Edits Matter: LLM-Driven Prompt Attack for Medical VLM Robustness in Ultrasoundcited by 0
  17. 2026Pen-Strategist: A Reasoning Framework for Penetration Testing Strategy Formation and Analysiscited by 0
  18. 2026Reasoning Before Diagnosis: Physician-Inspired Structured Thinking for ECG Classificationcited by 0
  19. 2026Information-theoretic Multimodal Representation Learning for Electrocardiogram Signalscited by 0
  20. 2026CardioLens: Revealing the Clinical Reality Gap of MLLMs via Multi-Sequence Cardiac MRI Evaluationscited by 0
  21. 2026Learning Where to Look: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Micro-Ultrasound Prostate Cancer Detectioncited by 0
  22. 2026MedUPS: Towards Diagnostic Assistance in Uncommon Medical Cases with Large Language Modelscited by 0
  23. 2026Continuous-Latent Predictive Modeling with Semantic Alignment for EEG-Language Foundation Modelscited by 0
  24. 2026Volumetric Radiology AI in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 0
  25. 2026TRACE: Expert-Aligned ECG Representation Learning with Rigorous Benchmarking and Real-World Validation in Acute Cardiac Carecited by 0
  26. 2026Beyond Teacher Assignment: Domain-Normalized Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillationcited by 0

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  1. 2026MMedExpert-R1: Strengthening Multimodal Medical Reasoning via Domain-Specific Adaptation and Clinical Guideline Reinforcement
  2. 2026MedMO: Grounding and Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Images
  3. 2025MedReason-R1: Learning to Reason for CT Diagnosis with Reinforcement Learning and Local Zoom
  4. 2025Toward Effective Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning for Medical VQA in Vision-Language Models
  5. 2025Clinical-R1: Empowering Large Language Models for Faithful and Comprehensive Reasoning with Clinical Objective Relative Policy Optimization
  6. 2025Benchmark Success, Clinical Failure: When Reinforcement Learning Optimizes for Benchmarks, Not Patients
  7. 2025InfiMed: Low-Resource Medical MLLMs with Advancing Understanding and Reasoning
  8. 2025MedGRPO: Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous Medical Video Understanding