Meissa: Multi-modal Medical Agentic Intelligence
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Medical vision-language models
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Abstract (arXiv)
Multi-modal large language models (MM-LLMs) have shown strong performance in medical image understanding and clinical reasoning. Recent medical agent systems extend them with tool use and multi-agent collaboration, enabling complex decision-making. However, these systems rely almost entirely on frontier models (e.g., GPT), whose API-based deployment incurs high cost, high latency, and privacy risks that conflict with on-premise clinical requirements. We present Meissa, a lightweight 4B-parameter medical MM-LLM that brings agentic capability offline. Instead of imitating static answers, Meissa learns both when to engage external interaction (strategy selection) and how to execute multi-step interaction (strategy execution) by distilling structured trajectories from frontier models. Specifically, we propose: (1) Unified trajectory modeling: trajectories (reasoning and action traces) are represented within a single state-action-observation formalism, allowing one model to generalize across heterogeneous medical environments. (2) Three-tier stratified supervision: the model's own errors trigger progressive escalation from direct reasoning to tool-augmented and multi-agent interaction, explicitly learning difficulty-aware strategy selection. (3) Prospective-retrospective supervision: pairing exploratory forward traces with hindsight-rationalized execution traces enables stable learning of effective interaction policies. Trained on 40K curated trajectories, Meissa matches or exceeds proprietary frontier agents in 10 of 16 evaluation settings across 13 medical benchmarks spanning radiology, pathology, and clinical reasoning. Using over 25x fewer parameters than typical frontier models like Gemini-3, Meissa operates fully offline with 22x lower end-to-end latency compared to API-based deployment. Data, models, and environments are released at https://github.com/Schuture/Meissa.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 46 of its 67 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2026.
Builds on
46 of 67 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2026MEDVISTAGYM: A Scalable Training Environment for Thinking with Medical Images via Tool-Integrated Reinforcement Learning12 Jan
- 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 · 43
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31 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026ClinSeekAgent: Automating Multimodal Evidence Seeking for Agentic Clinical Reasoningcited by 3
- 2026The Path to Self-Evolving Clinical Systems: Scaling Medical Agents from Assistance to Autonomycited by 1
- 2026Towards Reliable Fetal Ultrasound Interpretation with Multi-Agent Collaborationcited by 0
- 2026MIRA: Medical Image Reflection for Agentic Diagnosiscited by 0
- 2026BaT: Towards Self-Evolving Medical Research Agent with Stage Rubricscited by 0
- 2026BaT: Towards Self-Evolving Medical Research Agent with Stage Rubrics17 Aug 2026
- 2026MIRA: Medical Image Reflection for Agentic Diagnosis11 Aug 2026
- 2026The Path to Self-Evolving Clinical Systems: Scaling Medical Agents from Assistance to Autonomy13 Jul 2026
- 2026Towards Reliable Fetal Ultrasound Interpretation with Multi-Agent Collaboration25 May 2026
- 2026ClinSeekAgent: Automating Multimodal Evidence Seeking for Agentic Clinical Reasoning19 May 2026
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