XBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Visual-Language Explanations in Chest Radiography

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Luo, Haozhe, Shu, Shelley Zixin, Zhou, Ziyu, Otalora, Sebastian, Reyes, Mauricio
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Luo, Haozhe
Shu, Shelley Zixin
Zhou, Ziyu
Otalora, Sebastian
Reyes, Mauricio
author_facet Luo, Haozhe
Shu, Shelley Zixin
Zhou, Ziyu
Otalora, Sebastian
Reyes, Mauricio
contents Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown remarkable zero-shot performance in medical image understanding, yet their grounding ability, the extent to which textual concepts align with visual evidence, remains underexplored. In the medical domain, however, reliable grounding is essential for interpretability and clinical adoption. In this work, we present the first systematic benchmark for evaluating cross-modal interpretability in chest X-rays across seven CLIP-style VLM variants. We generate visual explanations using cross-attention and similarity-based localization maps, and quantitatively assess their alignment with radiologist-annotated regions across multiple pathologies. Our analysis reveals that: (1) while all VLM variants demonstrate reasonable localization for large and well-defined pathologies, their performance substantially degrades for small or diffuse lesions; (2) models that are pretrained on chest X-ray-specific datasets exhibit improved alignment compared to those trained on general-domain data. (3) The overall recognition ability and grounding ability of the model are strongly correlated. These findings underscore that current VLMs, despite their strong recognition ability, still fall short in clinically reliable grounding, highlighting the need for targeted interpretability benchmarks before deployment in medical practice. XBench code is available at https://github.com/Roypic/Benchmarkingattention
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19599
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle XBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Visual-Language Explanations in Chest Radiography
Luo, Haozhe
Shu, Shelley Zixin
Zhou, Ziyu
Otalora, Sebastian
Reyes, Mauricio
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown remarkable zero-shot performance in medical image understanding, yet their grounding ability, the extent to which textual concepts align with visual evidence, remains underexplored. In the medical domain, however, reliable grounding is essential for interpretability and clinical adoption. In this work, we present the first systematic benchmark for evaluating cross-modal interpretability in chest X-rays across seven CLIP-style VLM variants. We generate visual explanations using cross-attention and similarity-based localization maps, and quantitatively assess their alignment with radiologist-annotated regions across multiple pathologies. Our analysis reveals that: (1) while all VLM variants demonstrate reasonable localization for large and well-defined pathologies, their performance substantially degrades for small or diffuse lesions; (2) models that are pretrained on chest X-ray-specific datasets exhibit improved alignment compared to those trained on general-domain data. (3) The overall recognition ability and grounding ability of the model are strongly correlated. These findings underscore that current VLMs, despite their strong recognition ability, still fall short in clinically reliable grounding, highlighting the need for targeted interpretability benchmarks before deployment in medical practice. XBench code is available at https://github.com/Roypic/Benchmarkingattention
title XBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Visual-Language Explanations in Chest Radiography
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19599