MedAlign: A Synergistic Framework of Multimodal Preference Optimization and Federated Meta-Cognitive Reasoning

Recently, large models have shown significant potential for smart healthcare. However, the deployment of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for clinical services is currently hindered by three critical challenges: a tendency to hallucinate answers not grounded in visual evidence, the inefficiency of fixed-depth reasoning, and the difficulty of multi-institutional collaboration. To address these challenges, in this paper, we develop MedAlign, a novel framework to ensure visually accurate LVLM responses for Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA). Specifically, we first propose a multimodal Direct Preference Optimization (mDPO) objective to explicitly align preference learning with visual context. We then design a Retrieval-Aware Mixture-of-Experts (RA-MoE) architecture that utilizes image and text similarity to route queries to a specialized and context-augmented LVLM (i.e., an expert), thereby mitigating hallucinations in LVLMs. To achieve adaptive reasoning and facilitate multi-institutional collaboration, we propose a federated governance mechanism, where the selected expert, fine-tuned on clinical datasets based on mDPO, locally performs iterative Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning via the local meta-cognitive uncertainty estimator. Extensive experiments on three representative Med-VQA datasets demonstrate that MedAlign achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong retrieval-augmented baselines by up to 11.85% in F1-score, and simultaneously reducing the average reasoning length by 51.60% compared with fixed-depth CoT approaches.