Med-Scout: Curing MLLMs' Geometric Blindness in Medical Perception via Geometry-Aware RL Post-Training
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Medical vision-language models
Abstract (arXiv)
Despite recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs)' linguistic prowess in medical diagnosis, we find even state-of-the-art MLLMs suffer from a critical perceptual deficit: geometric blindness. This failure to ground outputs in objective geometric constraints leads to plausible yet factually incorrect hallucinations, rooted in training paradigms that prioritize linguistic fluency over geometric fidelity. This paper introduces Med-Scout, a novel framework that "cures" this blindness via Reinforcement Learning (RL) that leverages the intrinsic geometric logic latent within unlabeled medical images. Instead of relying on costly expert annotations, Med-Scout derives verifiable supervision signals through three strategic proxy tasks inspired by the systematic reading and reasoning patterns of clinicians: Hierarchical Scale Localization, Topological Jigsaw Reconstruction, and Anomaly Consistency Detection. To rigorously quantify this deficit, we present Med-Scout-Bench, a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate geometric perception. Extensive evaluations show that Med-Scout significantly mitigates geometric blindness, outperforming leading proprietary and open-source MLLMs by over 40% on our benchmark. Furthermore, this enhanced geometric perception generalizes to broader medical understanding, achieving superior results on radiological and comprehensive medical VQA tasks.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2026.
Builds on
30 of 41 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning8 Jun
- 2025Multimodal Large Language Models for Medicine: A Comprehensive Survey29 Apr
- 2024HuatuoGPT-Vision, Towards Injecting Medical Visual Knowledge into Multimodal LLMs at Scale27 Jun
- 2024OmniMedVQA: A New Large-Scale Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Medical LVLM14 Feb
- 2023LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day1 Jun
Other references · 25
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- 2021SLAKE: A Semantically-Labeled Knowledge-Enhanced Dataset for Medical Visual Question Answeringcited by 446
13 more
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- 2021How to Train Your Energy-Based Modelscited by 271
- 2025MedXpertQA: Benchmarking Expert-Level Medical Reasoning and Understandingcited by 218
- 2025MLLMs Know Where to Look: Training-free Perception of Small Visual Details with Multimodal LLMscited by 173
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- 2025Jigsaw-R1: A Study of Rule-based Visual Reinforcement Learning with Jigsaw Puzzlescited by 36
- 2024GeoGPT4V: Towards Geometric Multi-modal Large Language Models with Geometric Image Generationcited by 32
- 2025ViCrit: A Verifiable Reinforcement Learning Proxy Task for Visual Perception in VLMscited by 25
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