Synergizing Discriminative Exemplars and Self-Refined Experience for MLLM-based In-Context Learning in Medical Diagnosis
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Medical vision-language models
Abstract (arXiv)
General Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often underperform in capturing domain-specific nuances in medical diagnosis, trailing behind fully supervised baselines. Although fine-tuning provides a remedy, the high costs of expert annotation and massive computational overhead limit its scalability. To bridge this gap without updating the weights of the pre-trained backbone of the MLLM, we propose a Clinician Mimetic Workflow. This is a novel In-Context Learning (ICL) framework designed to synergize Discriminative Exemplar Coreset Selection (DECS) and Self-Refined Experience Summarization (SRES). Specifically, DECS simulates a clinician's ability to reference "anchor cases" by selecting discriminative visual coresets from noisy data at the computational level; meanwhile, SRES mimics the cognition and reflection in clinical diagnosis by distilling diverse rollouts into a dynamic textual Experience Bank. Extensive evaluation across all 12 datasets of the MedMNIST 2D benchmark demonstrates that our method outperforms zero-shot general and medical MLLMs. Simultaneously, it achieves performance levels comparable to fully supervised vision models and domain-specific fine-tuned MLLMs, setting a new benchmark for parameter-efficient medical in-context learning. Our code is available at an anonymous repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Synergizing-Discriminative-Exemplars-and-Self-Refined-Experience-ED74.
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 19 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2026.
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19 of 28 references.
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- 2025Exposing and Mitigating Calibration Biases and Demographic Unfairness in MLLM Few-Shot In-Context Learning for Medical Image Classification29 Jun
- 2024In-context learning enables multimodal large language models to classify cancer pathology images12 Mar
- 2023LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day1 Jun
- 2023BiomedGPT: A Generalist Vision-Language Foundation Model for Diverse Biomedical Tasks26 May
Other references · 15
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- 2022A ConvNet for the 2020scited by 3,545
- 2025SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Featurescited by 1,127
- 2021MedMNIST v2 -- A large-scale lightweight benchmark for 2D and 3D biomedical image classificationcited by 682
- 2025MedGemma Technical Reportcited by 398
- 2025Hulu-Med: A Transparent Generalist Model towards Holistic Medical Vision-Language Understandingcited by 96
- 2024Vision-Language Models Can Self-Improve Reasoning via Reflectioncited by 66
- 2025Training-Free Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 53
- 2025Show and Segment: Universal Medical Image Segmentation via In-Context Learningcited by 15
- 2025MMRAG: Multi-Mode Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Large Language Models for Biomedical In-Context Learningcited by 13
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