MMedExpert-R1: Strengthening Multimodal Medical Reasoning via Domain-Specific Adaptation and Clinical Guideline Reinforcement

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ding, Meidan, Zhang, Jipeng, Wang, Wenxuan, Zhong, Haiqin, Luo, Xiaoling, Chen, Wenting, Shen, Linlin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ding, Meidan
Zhang, Jipeng
Wang, Wenxuan
Zhong, Haiqin
Luo, Xiaoling
Chen, Wenting
Shen, Linlin
author_facet Ding, Meidan
Zhang, Jipeng
Wang, Wenxuan
Zhong, Haiqin
Luo, Xiaoling
Chen, Wenting
Shen, Linlin
contents Medical Vision-Language Models (MedVLMs) excel at perception tasks but struggle with complex clinical reasoning required in real-world scenarios. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored to enhance reasoning capabilities, existing approaches face critical mismatches: the scarcity of deep reasoning data, cold-start limits multi-specialty alignment, and standard RL algorithms fail to model clinical reasoning diversity. We propose MMedExpert-R1, a novel reasoning MedVLM that addresses these challenges through domain-specific adaptation and clinical guideline reinforcement. We construct MMedExpert, a high-quality dataset of 10K samples across four specialties with step-by-step reasoning traces. Our Domain-Specific Adaptation (DSA) creates specialty-specific LoRA modules to provide diverse initialization, while Guideline-Based Advantages (GBA) explicitly models different clinical reasoning perspectives to align with real-world diagnostic strategies. Conflict-Aware Capability Integration then merges these specialized experts into a unified agent, ensuring robust multi-specialty alignment. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with our 7B model achieving 27.50 on MedXpert-MM and 83.03 on OmniMedVQA, establishing a robust foundation for reliable multimodal medical reasoning systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_10949
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MMedExpert-R1: Strengthening Multimodal Medical Reasoning via Domain-Specific Adaptation and Clinical Guideline Reinforcement
Ding, Meidan
Zhang, Jipeng
Wang, Wenxuan
Zhong, Haiqin
Luo, Xiaoling
Chen, Wenting
Shen, Linlin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Medical Vision-Language Models (MedVLMs) excel at perception tasks but struggle with complex clinical reasoning required in real-world scenarios. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored to enhance reasoning capabilities, existing approaches face critical mismatches: the scarcity of deep reasoning data, cold-start limits multi-specialty alignment, and standard RL algorithms fail to model clinical reasoning diversity. We propose MMedExpert-R1, a novel reasoning MedVLM that addresses these challenges through domain-specific adaptation and clinical guideline reinforcement. We construct MMedExpert, a high-quality dataset of 10K samples across four specialties with step-by-step reasoning traces. Our Domain-Specific Adaptation (DSA) creates specialty-specific LoRA modules to provide diverse initialization, while Guideline-Based Advantages (GBA) explicitly models different clinical reasoning perspectives to align with real-world diagnostic strategies. Conflict-Aware Capability Integration then merges these specialized experts into a unified agent, ensuring robust multi-specialty alignment. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with our 7B model achieving 27.50 on MedXpert-MM and 83.03 on OmniMedVQA, establishing a robust foundation for reliable multimodal medical reasoning systems.
title MMedExpert-R1: Strengthening Multimodal Medical Reasoning via Domain-Specific Adaptation and Clinical Guideline Reinforcement
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10949