KG-CMI: Knowledge graph enhanced cross-Mamba interaction for medical visual question answering

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Main Authors: Zheng, Xianyao, Yu, Hong, Cui, Hui, Sun, Changming, Li, Xiangyu, Su, Ran, Wei, Leyi, Zhou, Jia, Wang, Junbo, Jin, Qiangguo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zheng, Xianyao
Yu, Hong
Cui, Hui
Sun, Changming
Li, Xiangyu
Su, Ran
Wei, Leyi
Zhou, Jia
Wang, Junbo
Jin, Qiangguo
author_facet Zheng, Xianyao
Yu, Hong
Cui, Hui
Sun, Changming
Li, Xiangyu
Su, Ran
Wei, Leyi
Zhou, Jia
Wang, Junbo
Jin, Qiangguo
contents Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is a crucial multimodal task in clinical decision support and telemedicine. Recent methods fail to fully leverage domain-specific medical knowledge, making it difficult to accurately associate lesion features in medical images with key diagnostic criteria. Additionally, classification-based approaches typically rely on predefined answer sets. Treating Med-VQA as a simple classification problem limits its ability to adapt to the diversity of free-form answers and may overlook detailed semantic information in those answers. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge graph enhanced cross-Mamba interaction (KG-CMI) framework, which consists of a fine-grained cross-modal feature alignment (FCFA) module, a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) module, a cross-modal interaction representation (CMIR) module, and a free-form answer enhanced multi-task learning (FAMT) module. The KG-CMI learns cross-modal feature representations for images and texts by effectively integrating professional medical knowledge through a graph, establishing associations between lesion features and disease knowledge. Moreover, FAMT leverages auxiliary knowledge from open-ended questions, improving the model's capability for open-ended Med-VQA. Experimental results demonstrate that KG-CMI outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three Med-VQA datasets, i.e., VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and OVQA. Additionally, we conduct interpretability experiments to further validate the framework's effectiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_00601
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle KG-CMI: Knowledge graph enhanced cross-Mamba interaction for medical visual question answering
Zheng, Xianyao
Yu, Hong
Cui, Hui
Sun, Changming
Li, Xiangyu
Su, Ran
Wei, Leyi
Zhou, Jia
Wang, Junbo
Jin, Qiangguo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is a crucial multimodal task in clinical decision support and telemedicine. Recent methods fail to fully leverage domain-specific medical knowledge, making it difficult to accurately associate lesion features in medical images with key diagnostic criteria. Additionally, classification-based approaches typically rely on predefined answer sets. Treating Med-VQA as a simple classification problem limits its ability to adapt to the diversity of free-form answers and may overlook detailed semantic information in those answers. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge graph enhanced cross-Mamba interaction (KG-CMI) framework, which consists of a fine-grained cross-modal feature alignment (FCFA) module, a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) module, a cross-modal interaction representation (CMIR) module, and a free-form answer enhanced multi-task learning (FAMT) module. The KG-CMI learns cross-modal feature representations for images and texts by effectively integrating professional medical knowledge through a graph, establishing associations between lesion features and disease knowledge. Moreover, FAMT leverages auxiliary knowledge from open-ended questions, improving the model's capability for open-ended Med-VQA. Experimental results demonstrate that KG-CMI outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three Med-VQA datasets, i.e., VQA-RAD, SLAKE, and OVQA. Additionally, we conduct interpretability experiments to further validate the framework's effectiveness.
title KG-CMI: Knowledge graph enhanced cross-Mamba interaction for medical visual question answering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00601