T3: Test-Time Model Merging in VLMs for Zero-Shot Medical Imaging Analysis

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Hauptverfasser: Imam, Raza, Wang, Hu, Mahapatra, Dwarikanath, Yaqub, Mohammad
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Imam, Raza
Wang, Hu
Mahapatra, Dwarikanath
Yaqub, Mohammad
author_facet Imam, Raza
Wang, Hu
Mahapatra, Dwarikanath
Yaqub, Mohammad
contents In medical imaging, vision-language models face a critical duality: pretrained networks offer broad robustness but lack subtle, modality-specific characteristics, while fine-tuned expert models achieve high in-distribution accuracy yet falter under modality shift. Existing model-merging techniques, designed for natural-image benchmarks, are simple and efficient but fail to deliver consistent gains across diverse medical modalities; their static interpolation limits reliability in varied clinical tasks. To address this, we introduce Test-Time Task adaptive merging (T^3), a backpropagation-free framework that computes per-sample interpolation coefficients via the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the two models' output distributions. T^3 dynamically preserves local precision when models agree and defers to generalist robustness under drift. To overcome the inference costs of sample-wise merging, we further propose a batch-wise extension, T^3_B, that computes a merging coefficient across a batch of samples, dramatically reducing computational bottleneck. Recognizing the lack of a standardized medical-merging benchmark, we present a rigorous cross-evaluation protocol spanning in-domain, base-to-novel, and corruptions across four modalities. Empirically, T^3 sets new state-of-the-art in Top-1 accuracy and error reduction, outperforming strong baselines while maintaining efficiency, paving the way for adaptive MVLM deployment in clinical settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/Razaimam45/TCube.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_27265
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle T3: Test-Time Model Merging in VLMs for Zero-Shot Medical Imaging Analysis
Imam, Raza
Wang, Hu
Mahapatra, Dwarikanath
Yaqub, Mohammad
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
In medical imaging, vision-language models face a critical duality: pretrained networks offer broad robustness but lack subtle, modality-specific characteristics, while fine-tuned expert models achieve high in-distribution accuracy yet falter under modality shift. Existing model-merging techniques, designed for natural-image benchmarks, are simple and efficient but fail to deliver consistent gains across diverse medical modalities; their static interpolation limits reliability in varied clinical tasks. To address this, we introduce Test-Time Task adaptive merging (T^3), a backpropagation-free framework that computes per-sample interpolation coefficients via the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the two models' output distributions. T^3 dynamically preserves local precision when models agree and defers to generalist robustness under drift. To overcome the inference costs of sample-wise merging, we further propose a batch-wise extension, T^3_B, that computes a merging coefficient across a batch of samples, dramatically reducing computational bottleneck. Recognizing the lack of a standardized medical-merging benchmark, we present a rigorous cross-evaluation protocol spanning in-domain, base-to-novel, and corruptions across four modalities. Empirically, T^3 sets new state-of-the-art in Top-1 accuracy and error reduction, outperforming strong baselines while maintaining efficiency, paving the way for adaptive MVLM deployment in clinical settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/Razaimam45/TCube.
title T3: Test-Time Model Merging in VLMs for Zero-Shot Medical Imaging Analysis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27265