{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/ramm-retrieval-augmented-biomedical-visual","title":"RAMM: Retrieval-augmented Biomedical Visual Question Answering with Multi-modal Pre-training","arxiv_id":"2303.00534","date":"2023-03-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zheng Yuan","Qiao Jin","Chuanqi Tan","Zhengyun Zhao","Hongyi Yuan","Fei Huang","Songfang Huang"],"abstract":"Vision-and-language multi-modal pretraining and fine-tuning have shown great success in visual question answering (VQA). Compared to general domain VQA, the performance of biomedical VQA suffers from limited data. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-augmented pretrain-and-finetune paradigm named RAMM for biomedical VQA to overcome the data limitation issue. Specifically, we collect a new biomedical dataset named PMCPM which offers patient-based image-text pairs containing diverse patient situations from PubMed. Then, we pretrain the biomedical multi-modal model to learn visual and textual representation for image-text pairs and align these representations with image-text contrastive objective (ITC). Finally, we propose a retrieval-augmented method to better use the limited data. We propose to retrieve similar image-text pairs based on ITC from pretraining datasets and introduce a novel retrieval-attention module to fuse the representation of the image and the question with the retrieved images and texts. Experiments demonstrate that our retrieval-augmented pretrain-and-finetune paradigm obtains state-of-the-art performance on Med-VQA2019, Med-VQA2021, VQARAD, and SLAKE datasets. Further analysis shows that the proposed RAMM and PMCPM can enhance biomedical VQA performance compared with previous resources and methods. We will open-source our dataset, codes, and pretrained model.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00534v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.00534v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"ramm-retrieval-augmented-biomedical-visual","repo_url":"https://github.com/GanjinZero/RAMM","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"question-answering","task_name":"Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering-1","task_name":"Visual Question Answering"},{"task_slug":"visual-question-answering","task_name":"Visual Question Answering (VQA)"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"align","method_name":"ALIGN"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.00534","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}