On the Robustness of Medical Vision-Language Models: Are they Truly Generalizable?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Imam, Raza, Marew, Rufael, Yaqub, Mohammad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Imam, Raza
Marew, Rufael
Yaqub, Mohammad
author_facet Imam, Raza
Marew, Rufael
Yaqub, Mohammad
contents Medical Vision-Language Models (MVLMs) have achieved par excellence generalization in medical image analysis, yet their performance under noisy, corrupted conditions remains largely untested. Clinical imaging is inherently susceptible to acquisition artifacts and noise; however, existing evaluations predominantly assess generally clean datasets, overlooking robustness -- i.e., the model's ability to perform under real-world distortions. To address this gap, we first introduce MediMeta-C, a corruption benchmark that systematically applies several perturbations across multiple medical imaging datasets. Combined with MedMNIST-C, this establishes a comprehensive robustness evaluation framework for MVLMs. We further propose RobustMedCLIP, a visual encoder adaptation of a pretrained MVLM that incorporates few-shot tuning to enhance resilience against corruptions. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark 5 major MVLMs across 5 medical imaging modalities, revealing that existing models exhibit severe degradation under corruption and struggle with domain-modality tradeoffs. Our findings highlight the necessity of diverse training and robust adaptation strategies, demonstrating that efficient low-rank adaptation when paired with few-shot tuning, improves robustness while preserving generalization across modalities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15425
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Robustness of Medical Vision-Language Models: Are they Truly Generalizable?
Imam, Raza
Marew, Rufael
Yaqub, Mohammad
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Medical Vision-Language Models (MVLMs) have achieved par excellence generalization in medical image analysis, yet their performance under noisy, corrupted conditions remains largely untested. Clinical imaging is inherently susceptible to acquisition artifacts and noise; however, existing evaluations predominantly assess generally clean datasets, overlooking robustness -- i.e., the model's ability to perform under real-world distortions. To address this gap, we first introduce MediMeta-C, a corruption benchmark that systematically applies several perturbations across multiple medical imaging datasets. Combined with MedMNIST-C, this establishes a comprehensive robustness evaluation framework for MVLMs. We further propose RobustMedCLIP, a visual encoder adaptation of a pretrained MVLM that incorporates few-shot tuning to enhance resilience against corruptions. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark 5 major MVLMs across 5 medical imaging modalities, revealing that existing models exhibit severe degradation under corruption and struggle with domain-modality tradeoffs. Our findings highlight the necessity of diverse training and robust adaptation strategies, demonstrating that efficient low-rank adaptation when paired with few-shot tuning, improves robustness while preserving generalization across modalities.
title On the Robustness of Medical Vision-Language Models: Are they Truly Generalizable?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15425