# A Medical Multimodal Diagnostic Framework Integrating Vision-Language Models and Logic Tree Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21583/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 22 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Clinical and biomedical applications](https://mlsanity.com/lr/clinical-and-biomedical-applications/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Medical vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/medical-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Encode Clinical Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13138/) (2022)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06146/) (2019)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10286/) (2020)
- [Med-Flamingo: a Multimodal Medical Few-shot Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15189/) (2023)
- [MedXpertQA: Benchmarking Expert-Level Medical Reasoning and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18362/) (2025)
- [MDAgents: An Adaptive Collaboration of LLMs for Medical Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15155/) (2024)
- [HealthGPT: A Medical Large Vision-Language Model for Unifying Comprehension and Generation via Heterogeneous Knowledge Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09838/) (2025)
- [Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Medicine with Iterative Follow-up Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00727/) (2024)
- [Boosting Novel Category Discovery Over Domains with Soft Contrastive Learning and All-in-One Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11262/) (2022)
- [UMIT: Unifying Medical Imaging Tasks via Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15892/) (2025)
- [MedLA: A Logic-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Complex Medical Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23725/) (2025)
- [EVNet: An Explainable Deep Network for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15478/) (2022)
- [DiffAug: Enhance Unsupervised Contrastive Learning with Domain-Knowledge-Free Diffusion-based Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07909/) (2023)

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

- [Joint Optimization of Reasoning and Dual-Memory for Self-Learning Diagnostic Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07269/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) in medicine, simply integrating clinical text and medical imaging does not guarantee reliable reasoning. Existing multimodal models often produce hallucinations or inconsistent chains of thought, limiting clinical trust. We propose a diagnostic framework built upon LLaVA that combines vision-language alignment with logic-regularized reasoning. The system includes an input encoder for text and images, a projection module for cross-modal alignment, a reasoning controller that decomposes diagnostic tasks into steps, and a logic tree generator that assembles stepwise premises into verifiable conclusions. Evaluations on MedXpertQA and other benchmarks show that our method improves diagnostic accuracy and yields more interpretable reasoning traces on multimodal tasks, while remaining competitive on text-only settings. These results suggest a promising step toward trustworthy multimodal medical AI.