ACE-LoRA: Graph-Attentive Context Enhancement for Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models

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Main Authors: Aydın, M. Arda, Yilmaz, Melih B., Koç, Aykut, Çukur, Tolga
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Aydın, M. Arda
Yilmaz, Melih B.
Koç, Aykut
Çukur, Tolga
author_facet Aydın, M. Arda
Yilmaz, Melih B.
Koç, Aykut
Çukur, Tolga
contents The success of CLIP-like vision-language models (VLMs) on natural images has inspired medical counterparts, yet existing approaches largely fall into two extremes: specialist models trained on single-domain data, which capture domain-specific details but generalize poorly, and generalist medical VLMs trained on multi-domain data, which retain broad semantics but dilute fine-grained diagnostic cues. Bridging this specialization-generalization trade-off remains challenging. To address this problem, we propose ACE-LoRA, a parameter-efficient adaptation framework for generalist medical VLMs that maintains robust zero-shot generalization. ACE-LoRA integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules into frozen image-text encoders and introduces an Attention-based Context Enhancement Hypergraph Neural Network (ACE-HGNN) module that captures higher-order contextual interactions beyond pairwise similarity to enrich global representations with localized diagnostic cues, addressing a key limitation of prior Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods that overlook fine-grained details. To further enhance cross-modal alignment, we formulate a label-guided InfoNCE loss to effectively suppress false negatives between semantically related image-text pairs. Despite adding only 0.95M trainable parameters, ACE-LoRA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art medical VLMs and PEFT baselines across zero-shot classification, segmentation, and detection benchmarks spanning multiple domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/icon-lab/ACE-LoRA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_17079
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ACE-LoRA: Graph-Attentive Context Enhancement for Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models
Aydın, M. Arda
Yilmaz, Melih B.
Koç, Aykut
Çukur, Tolga
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The success of CLIP-like vision-language models (VLMs) on natural images has inspired medical counterparts, yet existing approaches largely fall into two extremes: specialist models trained on single-domain data, which capture domain-specific details but generalize poorly, and generalist medical VLMs trained on multi-domain data, which retain broad semantics but dilute fine-grained diagnostic cues. Bridging this specialization-generalization trade-off remains challenging. To address this problem, we propose ACE-LoRA, a parameter-efficient adaptation framework for generalist medical VLMs that maintains robust zero-shot generalization. ACE-LoRA integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules into frozen image-text encoders and introduces an Attention-based Context Enhancement Hypergraph Neural Network (ACE-HGNN) module that captures higher-order contextual interactions beyond pairwise similarity to enrich global representations with localized diagnostic cues, addressing a key limitation of prior Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods that overlook fine-grained details. To further enhance cross-modal alignment, we formulate a label-guided InfoNCE loss to effectively suppress false negatives between semantically related image-text pairs. Despite adding only 0.95M trainable parameters, ACE-LoRA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art medical VLMs and PEFT baselines across zero-shot classification, segmentation, and detection benchmarks spanning multiple domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/icon-lab/ACE-LoRA.
title ACE-LoRA: Graph-Attentive Context Enhancement for Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17079