mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ELF: A Family of Encoder-Free ECG-Language Models

arXiv 2601.18798 ↗First posted 5 Jan 2026cs.MM cs.AIcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

ECG-Language Models (ELMs) extend recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to automated ECG interpretation. However, most existing ELMs inherit Vision-Language Model (VLM) design choices and rely on pretrained ECG encoders, introducing substantial architectural and training complexity. Inspired by encoder-free VLMs, we introduce ELF, a family of three encoder-free ELMs that remain competitive with, and often outperform, prior state-of-the-art ELMs across two datasets despite substantially simpler architectures and training pipelines. All code and data are available at github.com/ELM-Research/ECG-Language-Models.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 20 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

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20 of 41 references.

References · 20

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2020An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scalecited by 29,915
  3. 2021LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Modelscited by 14,084
  4. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  5. 2021Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learnerscited by 7,339
  6. 2015Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shiftcited by 6,979
  7. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  8. 2020Deep Learning for ECG Analysis: Benchmarks and Insights from PTB-XLcited by 158
  9. 2024Unveiling Encoder-Free Vision-Language Modelscited by 90
  10. 2024Guiding Masked Representation Learning to Capture Spatio-Temporal Relationship of Electrocardiogramcited by 84
  11. 2024Zero-Shot ECG Classification with Multimodal Learning and Test-time Clinical Knowledge Enhancementcited by 66
  12. 2017Cardiologist-Level Arrhythmia Detection with Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 52
8 more
  1. 2025EVEv2: Improved Baselines for Encoder-Free Vision-Language Modelscited by 38
  2. 2024ECG-Chat: A Large ECG-Language Model for Cardiac Disease Diagnosiscited by 37
  3. 2025Reading Your Heart: Learning ECG Words and Sentences via Pre-training ECG Language Modelcited by 36
  4. 2023Transfer Knowledge from Natural Language to Electrocardiography: Can We Detect Cardiovascular Disease Through Language Models?cited by 21
  5. 2024ECG-Byte: A Tokenizer for End-to-End Generative Electrocardiogram Language Modelingcited by 9
  6. 2025anyECG-chat: A Generalist ECG-MLLM for Flexible ECG Input and Multi-Task Understandingcited by 9
  7. 2025Signal, Image, or Symbolic: Exploring the Best Input Representation for Electrocardiogram-Language Models Through a Unified Frameworkcited by 2
  8. 2025Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Electrocardiogram-Language Modelscited by 2

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  1. 2026ECGQuest: Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning Language Models for Electrocardiography
  2. 2025ECG-LLM -- training and evaluation of domain-specific large language models for electrocardiography
  3. 2024Teach Multimodal LLMs to Comprehend Electrocardiographic Images
  4. 2024De-biased Multimodal Electrocardiogram Analysis
  5. 2026Physiology-Aware CNN and Zero-Shot Multimodal LLMs for ECG Image Classification: A Comparative Study
  6. 2026ECG-LLM: Foundation Model for ECG-Based Cardiac Reasoning
  7. 2025GEM: Empowering MLLM for Grounded ECG Understanding with Time Series and Images
  8. 2025ALFRED: Ask a Large-language model For Reliable ECG Diagnosis