DoubleTake: Contrastive Reasoning for Faithful Decision-Making in Medical Imaging

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Patel, Daivik, Patel, Shrenik
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Patel, Daivik
Patel, Shrenik
author_facet Patel, Daivik
Patel, Shrenik
contents Accurate decision making in medical imaging requires reasoning over subtle visual differences between confusable conditions, yet most existing approaches rely on nearest neighbor retrieval that returns redundant evidence and reinforces a single hypothesis. We introduce a contrastive, document-aware reference selection framework that constructs compact evidence sets optimized for discrimination rather than similarity by explicitly balancing visual relevance, embedding diversity, and source-level provenance using ROCO embeddings and metadata. While ROCO provides large-scale image-caption pairs, it does not specify how references should be selected for contrastive reasoning, and naive retrieval frequently yields near-duplicate figures from the same document. To address this gap, we release a reproducible reference selection protocol and curated reference bank that enable a systematic study of contrastive retrieval in medical image reasoning. Building on these contrastive evidence sets, we propose Counterfactual-Contrastive Inference, a confidence-aware reasoning framework that performs structured pairwise visual comparisons and aggregates evidence using margin-based decision rules with faithful abstention. On the MediConfusion benchmark, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving set-level accuracy by nearly 15% relative to prior methods while reducing confusion and improving individual accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02894
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DoubleTake: Contrastive Reasoning for Faithful Decision-Making in Medical Imaging
Patel, Daivik
Patel, Shrenik
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Accurate decision making in medical imaging requires reasoning over subtle visual differences between confusable conditions, yet most existing approaches rely on nearest neighbor retrieval that returns redundant evidence and reinforces a single hypothesis. We introduce a contrastive, document-aware reference selection framework that constructs compact evidence sets optimized for discrimination rather than similarity by explicitly balancing visual relevance, embedding diversity, and source-level provenance using ROCO embeddings and metadata. While ROCO provides large-scale image-caption pairs, it does not specify how references should be selected for contrastive reasoning, and naive retrieval frequently yields near-duplicate figures from the same document. To address this gap, we release a reproducible reference selection protocol and curated reference bank that enable a systematic study of contrastive retrieval in medical image reasoning. Building on these contrastive evidence sets, we propose Counterfactual-Contrastive Inference, a confidence-aware reasoning framework that performs structured pairwise visual comparisons and aggregates evidence using margin-based decision rules with faithful abstention. On the MediConfusion benchmark, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving set-level accuracy by nearly 15% relative to prior methods while reducing confusion and improving individual accuracy.
title DoubleTake: Contrastive Reasoning for Faithful Decision-Making in Medical Imaging
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02894