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Main Authors: Liang, Xiao, Hu, Jiawei, Wang, Di, Ma, Zhi, Zhao, Lin, Li, Ronghan, Wan, Bo, Wang, Quan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06959
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author Liang, Xiao
Hu, Jiawei
Wang, Di
Ma, Zhi
Zhao, Lin
Li, Ronghan
Wan, Bo
Wang, Quan
author_facet Liang, Xiao
Hu, Jiawei
Wang, Di
Ma, Zhi
Zhao, Lin
Li, Ronghan
Wan, Bo
Wang, Quan
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) are prone to hallucinations that critically compromise reliability in medical applications. While preference optimization can mitigate these hallucinations through clinical feedback, its implementation faces challenges such as clinically irrelevant training samples, imbalanced data distributions, and prohibitive expert annotation costs. To address these challenges, we introduce CheXPO, a Chest X-ray Preference Optimization strategy that combines confidence-similarity joint mining with counterfactual rationale. Our approach begins by synthesizing a unified, fine-grained multi-task chest X-ray visual instruction dataset across different question types for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We then identify hard examples through token-level confidence analysis of SFT failures and use similarity-based retrieval to expand hard examples for balancing preference sample distributions, while synthetic counterfactual rationales provide fine-grained clinical preferences, eliminating the need for additional expert input. Experiments show that CheXPO achieves 8.93% relative performance gain using only 5% of SFT samples, reaching state-of-the-art performance across diverse clinical tasks and providing a scalable, interpretable solution for real-world radiology applications.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CheXPO: Preference Optimization for Chest X-ray VLMs with Counterfactual Rationale
Liang, Xiao
Hu, Jiawei
Wang, Di
Ma, Zhi
Zhao, Lin
Li, Ronghan
Wan, Bo
Wang, Quan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision-language models (VLMs) are prone to hallucinations that critically compromise reliability in medical applications. While preference optimization can mitigate these hallucinations through clinical feedback, its implementation faces challenges such as clinically irrelevant training samples, imbalanced data distributions, and prohibitive expert annotation costs. To address these challenges, we introduce CheXPO, a Chest X-ray Preference Optimization strategy that combines confidence-similarity joint mining with counterfactual rationale. Our approach begins by synthesizing a unified, fine-grained multi-task chest X-ray visual instruction dataset across different question types for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We then identify hard examples through token-level confidence analysis of SFT failures and use similarity-based retrieval to expand hard examples for balancing preference sample distributions, while synthetic counterfactual rationales provide fine-grained clinical preferences, eliminating the need for additional expert input. Experiments show that CheXPO achieves 8.93% relative performance gain using only 5% of SFT samples, reaching state-of-the-art performance across diverse clinical tasks and providing a scalable, interpretable solution for real-world radiology applications.
title CheXPO: Preference Optimization for Chest X-ray VLMs with Counterfactual Rationale
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06959