Papers › Multi-modal Pre-training for Medical Vision-language Understanding and Generation: An...

Multi-modal Pre-training for Medical Vision-language Understanding and Generation: An Empirical Study with A New Benchmark

10 Jun 2023arXiv:2306.06494archive 2025-07-28

Li Xu, Bo Liu, Ameer Hamza Khan, Lu Fan, Xiao-Ming Wu

With the availability of large-scale, comprehensive, and general-purpose vision-language (VL) datasets such as MSCOCO, vision-language pre-training (VLP) has become an active area of research and proven to be effective for various VL tasks such as visual-question answering. However, studies on VLP in the medical domain have so far been scanty. To provide a comprehensive perspective on VLP for medical VL tasks, we conduct a thorough experimental analysis to study key factors that may affect the performance of VLP with a unified vision-language Transformer. To allow making sound and quick pre-training decisions, we propose RadioGraphy Captions (RGC), a high-quality, multi-modality radiographic dataset containing 18,434 image-caption pairs collected from an open-access online database MedPix. RGC can be used as a pre-training dataset or a new benchmark for medical report generation and medical image-text retrieval. By utilizing RGC and other available datasets for pre-training, we develop several key insights that can guide future medical VLP research and new strong baselines for various medical VL tasks.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

control-xl/medical-vision-langauge-transformer officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image-text RetrievalMedical Report GenerationQuestion AnsweringRetrievalText RetrievalVisual Question Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections