ReinPath: A Multimodal Reinforcement Learning Approach for Pathology
On the map: LLM reasoning → Clinical and biomedical applications
Abstract (arXiv)
Interpretability is significant in computational pathology, leading to the development of multimodal information integration from histopathological image and corresponding text data.However, existing multimodal methods have limited interpretability due to the lack of high-quality dataset that support explicit reasoning and inference and simple reasoning process.To address the above problems, we introduce a novel multimodal pathology large language model with strong reasoning capabilities.To improve the generation of accurate and contextually relevant textual descriptions, we design a semantic reward strategy integrated with group relative policy optimization.We construct a high-quality pathology visual question answering (VQA) dataset, specifically designed to support complex reasoning tasks.Comprehensive experiments conducted on this dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even when trained with only 20% of the data.Our method also achieves comparable performance on downstream zero-shot image classification task compared with CLIP.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 12 of its 19 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.
Builds on
12 of 19 references.
References · 12
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2023Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 4,418
- 2023LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Daycited by 1,305
- 2020PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answeringcited by 475
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- 2019Lung and Colon Cancer Histopathological Image Dataset (LC25000)cited by 89
- 2023Quilt-LLaVA: Visual Instruction Tuning by Extracting Localized Narratives from Open-Source Histopathology Videoscited by 86
- 2023PathAsst: A Generative Foundation AI Assistant Towards Artificial General Intelligence of Pathologycited by 57
- 2024PathMMU: A Massive Multimodal Expert-Level Benchmark for Understanding and Reasoning in Pathologycited by 43
- 2022WSSS4LUAD: Grand Challenge on Weakly-supervised Tissue Semantic Segmentation for Lung Adenocarcinomacited by 36
- 2025A Survey on Computational Pathology Foundation Models: Datasets, Adaptation Strategies, and Evaluation Taskscited by 16
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- 2025Discovering Pathology Rationale and Token Allocation for Efficient Multimodal Pathology Reasoning
- 2025Patho-R1: A Multimodal Reinforcement Learning-Based Pathology Expert Reasoner
- 2025A Versatile Pathology Co-pilot via Reasoning Enhanced Multimodal Large Language Model
- 2025PathVLM-R1: A Reinforcement Learning-Driven Reasoning Model for Pathology Visual-Language Tasks
- 2025TeamPath: Building MultiModal Pathology Experts with Reasoning AI Copilots
- 2025Patho-AgenticRAG: Towards Multimodal Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Pathology VLMs via Reinforcement Learning
- 2026See, Measure, and Reason: Learning Visually Grounded Reasoning in Pathology
- 2026Enhancing Pathological VLMs with Cross-scale Reasoning