Full Conformal Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Silva-Rodríguez, Julio, Fillioux, Leo, Cournède, Paul-Henry, Vakalopoulou, Maria, Christodoulidis, Stergios, Ayed, Ismail Ben, Dolz, Jose
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Silva-Rodríguez, Julio
Fillioux, Leo
Cournède, Paul-Henry
Vakalopoulou, Maria
Christodoulidis, Stergios
Ayed, Ismail Ben
Dolz, Jose
author_facet Silva-Rodríguez, Julio
Fillioux, Leo
Cournède, Paul-Henry
Vakalopoulou, Maria
Christodoulidis, Stergios
Ayed, Ismail Ben
Dolz, Jose
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained at large scale have shown unprecedented transferability capabilities and are being progressively integrated into medical image analysis. Although its discriminative potential has been widely explored, its reliability aspect remains overlooked. This work investigates their behavior under the increasingly popular split conformal prediction (SCP) framework, which theoretically guarantees a given error level on output sets by leveraging a labeled calibration set. However, the zero-shot performance of VLMs is inherently limited, and common practice involves few-shot transfer learning pipelines, which cannot absorb the rigid exchangeability assumptions of SCP. To alleviate this issue, we propose full conformal adaptation, a novel setting for jointly adapting and conformalizing pre-trained foundation models, which operates transductively over each test data point using a few-shot adaptation set. Moreover, we complement this framework with SS-Text, a novel training-free linear probe solver for VLMs that alleviates the computational cost of such a transductive approach. We provide comprehensive experiments using 3 different modality-specialized medical VLMs and 9 adaptation tasks. Our framework requires exactly the same data as SCP, and provides consistent relative improvements of up to 27% on set efficiency while maintaining the same coverage guarantees.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06076
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Full Conformal Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models
Silva-Rodríguez, Julio
Fillioux, Leo
Cournède, Paul-Henry
Vakalopoulou, Maria
Christodoulidis, Stergios
Ayed, Ismail Ben
Dolz, Jose
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained at large scale have shown unprecedented transferability capabilities and are being progressively integrated into medical image analysis. Although its discriminative potential has been widely explored, its reliability aspect remains overlooked. This work investigates their behavior under the increasingly popular split conformal prediction (SCP) framework, which theoretically guarantees a given error level on output sets by leveraging a labeled calibration set. However, the zero-shot performance of VLMs is inherently limited, and common practice involves few-shot transfer learning pipelines, which cannot absorb the rigid exchangeability assumptions of SCP. To alleviate this issue, we propose full conformal adaptation, a novel setting for jointly adapting and conformalizing pre-trained foundation models, which operates transductively over each test data point using a few-shot adaptation set. Moreover, we complement this framework with SS-Text, a novel training-free linear probe solver for VLMs that alleviates the computational cost of such a transductive approach. We provide comprehensive experiments using 3 different modality-specialized medical VLMs and 9 adaptation tasks. Our framework requires exactly the same data as SCP, and provides consistent relative improvements of up to 27% on set efficiency while maintaining the same coverage guarantees.
title Full Conformal Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06076