SkinFlow: Efficient Information Transmission for Open Dermatological Diagnosis via Dynamic Visual Encoding and Staged RL
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Medical vision-language models
Abstract (arXiv)
General-purpose Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their massive scale, often falter in dermatology due to "diffuse attention" - the inability to disentangle subtle pathological lesions from background noise. In this paper, we challenge the assumption that parameter scaling is the only path to medical precision. We introduce SkinFlow, a framework that treats diagnosis as an optimization of visual information transmission efficiency. Our approach utilizes a Virtual-Width Dynamic Vision Encoder (DVE) to "unfold" complex pathological manifolds without physical parameter expansion, coupled with a two-stage Reinforcement Learning strategy. This strategy sequentially aligns explicit medical descriptions (Stage I) and reconstructs implicit diagnostic textures (Stage II) within a constrained semantic space. Furthermore, we propose a clinically grounded evaluation protocol that prioritizes diagnostic safety and hierarchical relevance over rigid label matching. Empirical results are compelling: our 7B model establishes a new state-of-the-art on the Fitzpatrick17k benchmark, achieving a +12.06% gain in Top-1 accuracy and a +28.57% boost in Top-6 accuracy over the massive general-purpose models (e.g., Qwen3VL-235B and GPT-5.2). These findings demonstrate that optimizing geometric capacity and information flow yields superior diagnostic reasoning compared to raw parameter scaling.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 8 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2026.
Builds on
8 of 27 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning8 Jun
- 2025Derm1M: A Million-scale Vision-Language Dataset Aligned with Clinical Ontology Knowledge for Dermatology19 Mar
- 2024LLaVA-Ultra: Large Chinese Language and Vision Assistant for Ultrasound19 Oct
Other references · 5
- 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
- 2025SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-trainingcited by 655
- 2019Challenges of Real-World Reinforcement Learningcited by 282
- 2025Frequency Dynamic Convolution for Dense Image Predictioncited by 19
- 2025Artificial Intelligence Should Genuinely Support Clinical Reasoning and Decision Making To Bridge the Translational Gapcited by 13
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- 2025Skin-R1: Clinical Knowledge-Guided Dermatological Diagnosis Using Vision-Language Models
- 2025MAKE: Multi-Aspect Knowledge-Enhanced Vision-Language Pretraining for Zero-shot Dermatological Assessment
- 2026How Medical VLMs Underutilize Their Vision Encoders: A Dermatology Perspective
- 2026Mind the Rarities: Can Rare Skin Diseases Be Reliably Diagnosed via Diagnostic Reasoning?
- 2024SkinGEN: an Explainable Dermatology Diagnosis-to-Generation Framework with Interactive Vision-Language Models
- 2026DermaFlux: Synthetic Skin Lesion Generation with Rectified Flows for Enhanced Image Classification
- 2026SkinCLIP-VL: Consistency-Aware Vision-Language Learning for Multimodal Skin Cancer Diagnosis
- 2025MM-Skin: Enhancing Dermatology Vision-Language Model with an Image-Text Dataset Derived from Textbooks