Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21010 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866910062759378944 |
|---|---|
| author | Lu, Zhixiang Xu, Shijie Yan, Kaicheng Cai, Xuyue Zhang, Chong Li, Yulong Stefanidis, Angelos Nguyen, Anh Su, Jionglong |
| author_facet | Lu, Zhixiang Xu, Shijie Yan, Kaicheng Cai, Xuyue Zhang, Chong Li, Yulong Stefanidis, Angelos Nguyen, Anh Su, Jionglong |
| contents | The deployment of vision-language models (VLMs) in dermatology is hindered by the trilemma of high computational costs, extreme data scarcity, and the black-box nature of deep learning. To address these challenges, we present SkinCLIP-VL, a resource-efficient framework that adapts foundation models for trustworthy skin cancer diagnosis. Adopting a frozen perception, adaptive reasoning paradigm, we integrate a frozen CLIP encoder with a lightweight, quantized Qwen2.5-VL via low-rank adaptation (LoRA). To strictly align visual regions with clinical semantics under long-tailed distributions, we propose the Consistency-aware Focal Alignment (CFA) Loss. This objective synergizes focal re-weighting, semantic alignment, and calibration. On ISIC and Derm7pt benchmarks, SkinCLIP-VL surpasses 13B-parameter baselines by 4.3-6.2% in accuracy with 43% fewer parameters. Crucially, blinded expert evaluation and out-of-distribution testing confirm that our visually grounded rationales significantly enhance clinical trust compared to traditional saliency maps. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_21010 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | SkinCLIP-VL: Consistency-Aware Vision-Language Learning for Multimodal Skin Cancer Diagnosis Lu, Zhixiang Xu, Shijie Yan, Kaicheng Cai, Xuyue Zhang, Chong Li, Yulong Stefanidis, Angelos Nguyen, Anh Su, Jionglong Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition The deployment of vision-language models (VLMs) in dermatology is hindered by the trilemma of high computational costs, extreme data scarcity, and the black-box nature of deep learning. To address these challenges, we present SkinCLIP-VL, a resource-efficient framework that adapts foundation models for trustworthy skin cancer diagnosis. Adopting a frozen perception, adaptive reasoning paradigm, we integrate a frozen CLIP encoder with a lightweight, quantized Qwen2.5-VL via low-rank adaptation (LoRA). To strictly align visual regions with clinical semantics under long-tailed distributions, we propose the Consistency-aware Focal Alignment (CFA) Loss. This objective synergizes focal re-weighting, semantic alignment, and calibration. On ISIC and Derm7pt benchmarks, SkinCLIP-VL surpasses 13B-parameter baselines by 4.3-6.2% in accuracy with 43% fewer parameters. Crucially, blinded expert evaluation and out-of-distribution testing confirm that our visually grounded rationales significantly enhance clinical trust compared to traditional saliency maps. |
| title | SkinCLIP-VL: Consistency-Aware Vision-Language Learning for Multimodal Skin Cancer Diagnosis |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21010 |