# MedLayBench-V: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Expert-Lay Semantic Alignment in Medical Vision Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05738 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05738/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 19 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Medical vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/medical-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00890/) (2023)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [ScispaCy: Fast and Robust Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07669/) (2019)
- [PMC-CLIP: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training using Biomedical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07240/) (2023)
- [Multi-domain Clinical Natural Language Processing with MedCAT: the Medical Concept Annotation Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01165/) (2020)
- [Making Science Simple: Corpora for the Lay Summarisation of Scientific Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09932/) (2022)
- [LENS: A Learnable Evaluation Metric for Text Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09739/) (2022)
- [MedAgentBoard: Benchmarking Multi-Agent Collaboration with Conventional Methods for Diverse Medical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12371/) (2025)
- [Overview of the BioLaySumm 2024 Shared Task on the Lay Summarization of Biomedical Research Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08566/) (2024)
- [README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15561/) (2023)
- [X-ray Made Simple: Lay Radiology Report Generation and Robust Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17911/) (2024)
- [Visual Question Answering in the Medical Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11080/) (2023)
- [Magical: Medical Lay Language Generation via Semantic Invariance and Layperson-tailored Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08730/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MEDLAYXPLAIN: Benchmarking the Expert-Lay Gap in Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21194/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs) have achieved expert-level proficiency in interpreting diagnostic imaging. However, current models are predominantly trained on professional literature, limiting their ability to communicate findings in the lay register required for patient-centered care. While text-centric research has actively developed resources for simplifying medical jargon, there is a critical absence of large-scale multimodal benchmarks designed to facilitate lay-accessible medical image understanding. To bridge this resource gap, we introduce MedLayBench-V, the first large-scale multimodal benchmark dedicated to expert-lay semantic alignment. Unlike naive simplification approaches that risk hallucination, our dataset is constructed via a Structured Concept-Grounded Refinement (SCGR) pipeline. This method enforces strict semantic equivalence by integrating Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) with micro-level entity constraints. MedLayBench-V provides a verified foundation for training and evaluating next-generation Med-VLMs capable of bridging the communication divide between clinical experts and patients.