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Main Authors: Liu, Lijun, Chen, Linwei, Zhang, Zhishou, Tian, Meng, Cui, Hengfu, Li, Ruiyang, Liu, Zhaocheng, Ju, Qiang, Li, Qianxi, Zhou, Hong-Yu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09136
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author Liu, Lijun
Chen, Linwei
Zhang, Zhishou
Tian, Meng
Cui, Hengfu
Li, Ruiyang
Liu, Zhaocheng
Ju, Qiang
Li, Qianxi
Zhou, Hong-Yu
author_facet Liu, Lijun
Chen, Linwei
Zhang, Zhishou
Tian, Meng
Cui, Hengfu
Li, Ruiyang
Liu, Zhaocheng
Ju, Qiang
Li, Qianxi
Zhou, Hong-Yu
contents General-purpose Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their massive scale, often falter in dermatology due to "diffuse attention" - the inability to disentangle subtle pathological lesions from background noise. In this paper, we challenge the assumption that parameter scaling is the only path to medical precision. We introduce SkinFlow, a framework that treats diagnosis as an optimization of visual information transmission efficiency. Our approach utilizes a Virtual-Width Dynamic Vision Encoder (DVE) to "unfold" complex pathological manifolds without physical parameter expansion, coupled with a two-stage Reinforcement Learning strategy. This strategy sequentially aligns explicit medical descriptions (Stage I) and reconstructs implicit diagnostic textures (Stage II) within a constrained semantic space. Furthermore, we propose a clinically grounded evaluation protocol that prioritizes diagnostic safety and hierarchical relevance over rigid label matching. Empirical results are compelling: our 7B model establishes a new state-of-the-art on the Fitzpatrick17k benchmark, achieving a +12.06% gain in Top-1 accuracy and a +28.57% boost in Top-6 accuracy over the massive general-purpose models (e.g., Qwen3VL-235B and GPT-5.2). These findings demonstrate that optimizing geometric capacity and information flow yields superior diagnostic reasoning compared to raw parameter scaling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_09136
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SkinFlow: Efficient Information Transmission for Open Dermatological Diagnosis via Dynamic Visual Encoding and Staged RL
Liu, Lijun
Chen, Linwei
Zhang, Zhishou
Tian, Meng
Cui, Hengfu
Li, Ruiyang
Liu, Zhaocheng
Ju, Qiang
Li, Qianxi
Zhou, Hong-Yu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
General-purpose Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), despite their massive scale, often falter in dermatology due to "diffuse attention" - the inability to disentangle subtle pathological lesions from background noise. In this paper, we challenge the assumption that parameter scaling is the only path to medical precision. We introduce SkinFlow, a framework that treats diagnosis as an optimization of visual information transmission efficiency. Our approach utilizes a Virtual-Width Dynamic Vision Encoder (DVE) to "unfold" complex pathological manifolds without physical parameter expansion, coupled with a two-stage Reinforcement Learning strategy. This strategy sequentially aligns explicit medical descriptions (Stage I) and reconstructs implicit diagnostic textures (Stage II) within a constrained semantic space. Furthermore, we propose a clinically grounded evaluation protocol that prioritizes diagnostic safety and hierarchical relevance over rigid label matching. Empirical results are compelling: our 7B model establishes a new state-of-the-art on the Fitzpatrick17k benchmark, achieving a +12.06% gain in Top-1 accuracy and a +28.57% boost in Top-6 accuracy over the massive general-purpose models (e.g., Qwen3VL-235B and GPT-5.2). These findings demonstrate that optimizing geometric capacity and information flow yields superior diagnostic reasoning compared to raw parameter scaling.
title SkinFlow: Efficient Information Transmission for Open Dermatological Diagnosis via Dynamic Visual Encoding and Staged RL
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09136