Test-Time-Scaling for Zero-Shot Diagnosis with Visual-Language Reasoning

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Hauptverfasser: Byun, Ji Young, Park, Young-Jin, Azizan, Navid, Chellappa, Rama
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Byun, Ji Young
Park, Young-Jin
Azizan, Navid
Chellappa, Rama
author_facet Byun, Ji Young
Park, Young-Jin
Azizan, Navid
Chellappa, Rama
contents As a cornerstone of patient care, clinical decision-making significantly influences patient outcomes and can be enhanced by large language models (LLMs). Although LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance, their application to visual question answering in medical imaging, particularly for reasoning-based diagnosis, remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, supervised fine-tuning for reasoning tasks is largely impractical due to limited data availability and high annotation costs. In this work, we introduce a zero-shot framework for reliable medical image diagnosis that enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in clinical settings through test-time scaling. Given a medical image and a textual prompt, a vision-language model processes a medical image along with a corresponding textual prompt to generate multiple descriptions or interpretations of visual features. These interpretations are then fed to an LLM, where a test-time scaling strategy consolidates multiple candidate outputs into a reliable final diagnosis. We evaluate our approach across various medical imaging modalities -- including radiology, ophthalmology, and histopathology -- and demonstrate that the proposed test-time scaling strategy enhances diagnostic accuracy for both our and baseline methods. Additionally, we provide an empirical analysis showing that the proposed approach, which allows unbiased prompting in the first stage, improves the reliability of LLM-generated diagnoses and enhances classification accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11166
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Test-Time-Scaling for Zero-Shot Diagnosis with Visual-Language Reasoning
Byun, Ji Young
Park, Young-Jin
Azizan, Navid
Chellappa, Rama
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
As a cornerstone of patient care, clinical decision-making significantly influences patient outcomes and can be enhanced by large language models (LLMs). Although LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance, their application to visual question answering in medical imaging, particularly for reasoning-based diagnosis, remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, supervised fine-tuning for reasoning tasks is largely impractical due to limited data availability and high annotation costs. In this work, we introduce a zero-shot framework for reliable medical image diagnosis that enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in clinical settings through test-time scaling. Given a medical image and a textual prompt, a vision-language model processes a medical image along with a corresponding textual prompt to generate multiple descriptions or interpretations of visual features. These interpretations are then fed to an LLM, where a test-time scaling strategy consolidates multiple candidate outputs into a reliable final diagnosis. We evaluate our approach across various medical imaging modalities -- including radiology, ophthalmology, and histopathology -- and demonstrate that the proposed test-time scaling strategy enhances diagnostic accuracy for both our and baseline methods. Additionally, we provide an empirical analysis showing that the proposed approach, which allows unbiased prompting in the first stage, improves the reliability of LLM-generated diagnoses and enhances classification accuracy.
title Test-Time-Scaling for Zero-Shot Diagnosis with Visual-Language Reasoning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11166