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Apr 17

Ontology-Based Concept Distillation for Radiology Report Retrieval and Labeling

Retrieval-augmented learning based on radiology reports has emerged as a promising direction to improve performance on long-tail medical imaging tasks, such as rare disease detection in chest X-rays. Most existing methods rely on comparing high-dimensional text embeddings from models like CLIP or CXR-BERT, which are often difficult to interpret, computationally expensive, and not well-aligned with the structured nature of medical knowledge. We propose a novel, ontology-driven alternative for comparing radiology report texts based on clinically grounded concepts from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). Our method extracts standardised medical entities from free-text reports using an enhanced pipeline built on RadGraph-XL and SapBERT. These entities are linked to UMLS concepts (CUIs), enabling a transparent, interpretable set-based representation of each report. We then define a task-adaptive similarity measure based on a modified and weighted version of the Tversky Index that accounts for synonymy, negation, and hierarchical relationships between medical entities. This allows efficient and semantically meaningful similarity comparisons between reports. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art embedding-based retrieval methods in a radiograph classification task on MIMIC-CXR, particularly in long-tail settings. Additionally, we use our pipeline to generate ontology-backed disease labels for MIMIC-CXR, offering a valuable new resource for downstream learning tasks. Our work provides more explainable, reliable, and task-specific retrieval strategies in clinical AI systems, especially when interpretability and domain knowledge integration are essential. Our code is available at https://github.com/Felix-012/ontology-concept-distillation

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 27, 2025

MedVista3D: Vision-Language Modeling for Reducing Diagnostic Errors in 3D CT Disease Detection, Understanding and Reporting

Radiologic diagnostic errors-under-reading errors, inattentional blindness, and communication failures-remain prevalent in clinical practice. These issues often stem from missed localized abnormalities, limited global context, and variability in report language. These challenges are amplified in 3D imaging, where clinicians must examine hundreds of slices per scan. Addressing them requires systems with precise localized detection, global volume-level reasoning, and semantically consistent natural language reporting. However, existing 3D vision-language models are unable to meet all three needs jointly, lacking local-global understanding for spatial reasoning and struggling with the variability and noise of uncurated radiology reports. We present MedVista3D, a multi-scale semantic-enriched vision-language pretraining framework for 3D CT analysis. To enable joint disease detection and holistic interpretation, MedVista3D performs local and global image-text alignment for fine-grained representation learning within full-volume context. To address report variability, we apply language model rewrites and introduce a Radiology Semantic Matching Bank for semantics-aware alignment. MedVista3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot disease classification, report retrieval, and medical visual question answering, while transferring well to organ segmentation and prognosis prediction. Code and datasets will be released.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 3, 2025 2

ResearcherBench: Evaluating Deep AI Research Systems on the Frontiers of Scientific Inquiry

The emergence of deep research systems presents significant capabilities in problem-solving, extending from basic queries to sophisticated research tasks. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate these systems as agents for web retrieval and report generation, overlooking their potential to discover novel insights on the frontiers of scientific research. To address this gap, we introduce ResearcherBench, the first benchmark focused on evaluating the capabilities of these advanced, agentic systems - which we refer to as Deep AI Research Systems (DARS) - on frontier AI scientific questions. We compiled a dataset of 65 research questions expertly selected from real-world scientific scenarios such as laboratory discussions and interviews, spanning 35 different AI subjects and categorized into three types: technical details, literature review, and open consulting. Our dual evaluation framework combines rubric assessment, which uses expert-designed criteria to evaluate insight quality, with factual assessment, which measures citation accuracy (faithfulness) and coverage (groundedness). We evaluated several leading commercial DARS and baseline systems. Results show that OpenAI Deep Research and Gemini Deep Research significantly outperform other systems, with particular strength in open-ended consulting questions. Such capabilities represent a meaningful step toward AI self-improvement, aligning with the vision of ASI for AI. We open-source ResearcherBench to provide a standardized platform for promoting the development of next-generation AI research assistants, hoping to foster a new perspective in AI research evaluation for a novel pattern of scientific collaboration: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/ResearcherBench.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025

Team Xiaomi EV-AD VLA: Caption-Guided Retrieval System for Cross-Modal Drone Navigation -- Technical Report for IROS 2025 RoboSense Challenge Track 4

Cross-modal drone navigation remains a challenging task in robotics, requiring efficient retrieval of relevant images from large-scale databases based on natural language descriptions. The RoboSense 2025 Track 4 challenge addresses this challenge, focusing on robust, natural language-guided cross-view image retrieval across multiple platforms (drones, satellites, and ground cameras). Current baseline methods, while effective for initial retrieval, often struggle to achieve fine-grained semantic matching between text queries and visual content, especially in complex aerial scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage retrieval refinement method: Caption-Guided Retrieval System (CGRS) that enhances the baseline coarse ranking through intelligent reranking. Our method first leverages a baseline model to obtain an initial coarse ranking of the top 20 most relevant images for each query. We then use Vision-Language-Model (VLM) to generate detailed captions for these candidate images, capturing rich semantic descriptions of their visual content. These generated captions are then used in a multimodal similarity computation framework to perform fine-grained reranking of the original text query, effectively building a semantic bridge between the visual content and natural language descriptions. Our approach significantly improves upon the baseline, achieving a consistent 5\% improvement across all key metrics (Recall@1, Recall@5, and Recall@10). Our approach win TOP-2 in the challenge, demonstrating the practical value of our semantic refinement strategy in real-world robotic navigation scenarios.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 3, 2025

Retrieval Augmented Generation Evaluation for Health Documents

Safe and trustworthy use of Large Language Models (LLM) in the processing of healthcare documents and scientific papers could substantially help clinicians, scientists and policymakers in overcoming information overload and focusing on the most relevant information at a given moment. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a promising method to leverage the potential of LLMs while enhancing the accuracy of their outcomes. This report assesses the potentials and shortcomings of such approaches in the automatic knowledge synthesis of different types of documents in the health domain. To this end, it describes: (1) an internally developed proof of concept pipeline that employs state-of-the-art practices to deliver safe and trustable analysis for healthcare documents and scientific papers called RAGEv (Retrieval Augmented Generation Evaluation); (2) a set of evaluation tools for LLM-based document retrieval and generation; (3) a benchmark dataset to verify the accuracy and veracity of the results called RAGEv-Bench. It concludes that careful implementations of RAG techniques could minimize most of the common problems in the use of LLMs for document processing in the health domain, obtaining very high scores both on short yes/no answers and long answers. There is a high potential for incorporating it into the day-to-day work of policy support tasks, but additional efforts are required to obtain a consistent and trustworthy tool.

  • 11 authors
·
May 7, 2025

LFM2 Technical Report

We present LFM2, a family of Liquid Foundation Models designed for efficient on-device deployment and strong task capabilities. Using hardware-in-the-loop architecture search under edge latency and memory constraints, we obtain a compact hybrid backbone that combines gated short convolutions with a small number of grouped query attention blocks, delivering up to 2x faster prefill and decode on CPUs compared to similarly sized models. The LFM2 family covers 350M-8.3B parameters, including dense models (350M, 700M, 1.2B, 2.6B) and a mixture-of-experts variant (8.3B total, 1.5B active), all with 32K context length. LFM2's training pipeline includes a tempered, decoupled Top-K knowledge distillation objective that avoids support mismatch; curriculum learning with difficulty-ordered data; and a three-stage post-training recipe of supervised fine-tuning, length-normalized preference optimization, and model merging. Pre-trained on 10-12T tokens, LFM2 models achieve strong results across diverse benchmarks; for example, LFM2-2.6B reaches 79.56% on IFEval and 82.41% on GSM8K. We further build multimodal and retrieval variants: LFM2-VL for vision-language tasks, LFM2-Audio for speech, and LFM2-ColBERT for retrieval. LFM2-VL supports tunable accuracy-latency tradeoffs via token-efficient visual processing, while LFM2-Audio separates audio input and output pathways to enable real-time speech-to-speech interaction competitive with models 3x larger. LFM2-ColBERT provides a low-latency encoder for queries and documents, enabling high-performance retrieval across multiple languages. All models are released with open weights and deployment packages for ExecuTorch, llama.cpp, and vLLM, making LFM2 a practical base for edge applications that need fast, memory-efficient inference and strong task capabilities.

LiquidAI Liquid AI
·
Nov 28, 2025 3

Vietnamese Legal Information Retrieval in Question-Answering System

In the modern era of rapidly increasing data volumes, accurately retrieving and recommending relevant documents has become crucial in enhancing the reliability of Question Answering (QA) systems. Recently, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has gained significant recognition for enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by mitigating hallucination issues in QA systems, which is particularly beneficial in the legal domain. Various methods, such as semantic search using dense vector embeddings or a combination of multiple techniques to improve results before feeding them to LLMs, have been proposed. However, these methods often fall short when applied to the Vietnamese language due to several challenges, namely inefficient Vietnamese data processing leading to excessive token length or overly simplistic ensemble techniques that lead to instability and limited improvement. Moreover, a critical issue often overlooked is the ordering of final relevant documents which are used as reference to ensure the accuracy of the answers provided by LLMs. In this report, we introduce our three main modifications taken to address these challenges. First, we explore various practical approaches to data processing to overcome the limitations of the embedding model. Additionally, we enhance Reciprocal Rank Fusion by normalizing order to combine results from keyword and vector searches effectively. We also meticulously re-rank the source pieces of information used by LLMs with Active Retrieval to improve user experience when refining the information generated. In our opinion, this technique can also be considered as a new re-ranking method that might be used in place of the traditional cross encoder. Finally, we integrate these techniques into a comprehensive QA system, significantly improving its performance and reliability

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 4, 2024

CONFLARE: CONFormal LArge language model REtrieval

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks enable large language models (LLMs) to retrieve relevant information from a knowledge base and incorporate it into the context for generating responses. This mitigates hallucinations and allows for the updating of knowledge without retraining the LLM. However, RAG does not guarantee valid responses if retrieval fails to identify the necessary information as the context for response generation. Also, if there is contradictory content, the RAG response will likely reflect only one of the two possible responses. Therefore, quantifying uncertainty in the retrieval process is crucial for ensuring RAG trustworthiness. In this report, we introduce a four-step framework for applying conformal prediction to quantify retrieval uncertainty in RAG frameworks. First, a calibration set of questions answerable from the knowledge base is constructed. Each question's embedding is compared against document embeddings to identify the most relevant document chunks containing the answer and record their similarity scores. Given a user-specified error rate ({\alpha}), these similarity scores are then analyzed to determine a similarity score cutoff threshold. During inference, all chunks with similarity exceeding this threshold are retrieved to provide context to the LLM, ensuring the true answer is captured in the context with a (1-{\alpha}) confidence level. We provide a Python package that enables users to implement the entire workflow proposed in our work, only using LLMs and without human intervention.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 3, 2024

Qwen3-VL-Embedding and Qwen3-VL-Reranker: A Unified Framework for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Retrieval and Ranking

In this report, we introduce the Qwen3-VL-Embedding and Qwen3-VL-Reranker model series, the latest extensions of the Qwen family built on the Qwen3-VL foundation model. Together, they provide an end-to-end pipeline for high-precision multimodal search by mapping diverse modalities, including text, images, document images, and video, into a unified representation space. The Qwen3-VL-Embedding model employs a multi-stage training paradigm, progressing from large-scale contrastive pre-training to reranking model distillation, to generate semantically rich high-dimensional vectors. It supports Matryoshka Representation Learning, enabling flexible embedding dimensions, and handles inputs up to 32k tokens. Complementing this, Qwen3-VL-Reranker performs fine-grained relevance estimation for query-document pairs using a cross-encoder architecture with cross-attention mechanisms. Both model series inherit the multilingual capabilities of Qwen3-VL, supporting more than 30 languages, and are released in 2B and 8B parameter sizes to accommodate diverse deployment requirements. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the Qwen3-VL-Embedding series achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse multimodal embedding evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, Qwen3-VL-Embedding-8B attains an overall score of 77.8 on MMEB-V2, ranking first among all models (as of January 8, 2025). This report presents the architecture, training methodology, and practical capabilities of the series, demonstrating their effectiveness on various multimodal retrieval tasks, including image-text retrieval, visual question answering, and video-text matching.

Qwen Qwen
·
Jan 8 3

SAIL-Embedding Technical Report: Omni-modal Embedding Foundation Model

Multimodal embedding models aim to yield informative unified representations that empower diverse cross-modal tasks. Despite promising developments in the evolution from CLIP-based dual-tower architectures to large vision-language models, prior works still face unavoidable challenges in real-world applications and business scenarios, such as the limited modality support, unstable training mechanisms, and industrial domain gaps. In this work, we introduce SAIL-Embedding, an omni-modal embedding foundation model that addresses these issues through tailored training strategies and architectural design. In the optimization procedure, we propose a multi-stage training scheme to boost the multifaceted effectiveness of representation learning. Specifically, the content-aware progressive training aims to enhance the model's adaptability to diverse downstream tasks and master enriched cross-modal proficiency. The collaboration-aware recommendation enhancement training further adapts multimodal representations for recommendation scenarios by distilling knowledge from sequence-to-item and ID-to-item embeddings while mining user historical interests. Concurrently, we develop the stochastic specialization and dataset-driven pattern matching to strengthen model training flexibility and generalizability. Experimental results show that SAIL-Embedding achieves SOTA performance compared to other methods in different retrieval tasks. In online experiments across various real-world scenarios integrated with our model, we observe a significant increase in Lifetime (LT), which is a crucial indicator for the recommendation experience. For instance, the model delivers the 7-day LT gain of +0.158% and the 14-day LT gain of +0.144% in the Douyin-Selected scenario. For the Douyin feed rank model, the match features produced by SAIL-Embedding yield a +0.08% AUC gain.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
Oct 14, 2025 2

LG-ANNA-Embedding technical report

This report presents a unified instruction-based framework for learning generalized text embeddings optimized for both information retrieval (IR) and non-IR tasks. Built upon a decoder-only large language model (Mistral-7B), our approach combines in-context learning, soft supervision, and adaptive hard-negative mining to generate context-aware embeddings without task-specific fine-tuning. Structured instructions and few-shot examples are used to guide the model across diverse tasks, enabling strong performance on classification, semantic similarity, clustering, and reranking benchmarks. To improve semantic discrimination, we employ a soft labeling framework where continuous relevance scores, distilled from a high-performance dense retriever and reranker, serve as fine-grained supervision signals. In addition, we introduce adaptive margin-based hard-negative mining, which filters out semantically ambiguous negatives based on their similarity to positive examples, thereby enhancing training stability and retrieval robustness. Our model is evaluated on the newly introduced MTEB (English, v2) benchmark, covering 41 tasks across seven categories. Results show that our method achieves strong generalization and ranks among the top-performing models by Borda score, outperforming several larger or fully fine-tuned baselines. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining in-context prompting, soft supervision, and adaptive sampling for scalable, high-quality embedding generation.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025

On the Importance of Text Preprocessing for Multimodal Representation Learning and Pathology Report Generation

Vision-language models in pathology enable multimodal case retrieval and automated report generation. Many of the models developed so far, however, have been trained on pathology reports that include information which cannot be inferred from paired whole slide images (e.g., patient history), potentially leading to hallucinated sentences in generated reports. To this end, we investigate how the selection of information from pathology reports for vision-language modeling affects the quality of the multimodal representations and generated reports. More concretely, we compare a model trained on full reports against a model trained on preprocessed reports that only include sentences describing the cell and tissue appearances based on the H&E-stained slides. For the experiments, we built upon the BLIP-2 framework and used a cutaneous melanocytic lesion dataset of 42,433 H&E-stained whole slide images and 19,636 corresponding pathology reports. Model performance was assessed using image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, as well as qualitative evaluation of the generated reports by an expert pathologist. Our results demonstrate that text preprocessing prevents hallucination in report generation. Despite the improvement in the quality of the generated reports, training the vision-language model on full reports showed better cross-modal retrieval performance.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 26, 2025

Retrieval Augmented Generation and Understanding in Vision: A Survey and New Outlook

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal technique in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by enabling access to external, reliable, and up-to-date knowledge sources. In the context of AI-Generated Content (AIGC), RAG has proven invaluable by augmenting model outputs with supplementary, relevant information, thus improving their quality. Recently, the potential of RAG has extended beyond natural language processing, with emerging methods integrating retrieval-augmented strategies into the computer vision (CV) domain. These approaches aim to address the limitations of relying solely on internal model knowledge by incorporating authoritative external knowledge bases, thereby improving both the understanding and generation capabilities of vision models. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the current state of retrieval-augmented techniques in CV, focusing on two main areas: (I) visual understanding and (II) visual generation. In the realm of visual understanding, we systematically review tasks ranging from basic image recognition to complex applications such as medical report generation and multimodal question answering. For visual content generation, we examine the application of RAG in tasks related to image, video, and 3D generation. Furthermore, we explore recent advancements in RAG for embodied AI, with a particular focus on applications in planning, task execution, multimodal perception, interaction, and specialized domains. Given that the integration of retrieval-augmented techniques in CV is still in its early stages, we also highlight the key limitations of current approaches and propose future research directions to drive the development of this promising area.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 23, 2025

RecGPT Technical Report

Recommender systems are among the most impactful applications of artificial intelligence, serving as critical infrastructure connecting users, merchants, and platforms. However, most current industrial systems remain heavily reliant on historical co-occurrence patterns and log-fitting objectives, i.e., optimizing for past user interactions without explicitly modeling user intent. This log-fitting approach often leads to overfitting to narrow historical preferences, failing to capture users' evolving and latent interests. As a result, it reinforces filter bubbles and long-tail phenomena, ultimately harming user experience and threatening the sustainability of the whole recommendation ecosystem. To address these challenges, we rethink the overall design paradigm of recommender systems and propose RecGPT, a next-generation framework that places user intent at the center of the recommendation pipeline. By integrating large language models (LLMs) into key stages of user interest mining, item retrieval, and explanation generation, RecGPT transforms log-fitting recommendation into an intent-centric process. To effectively align general-purpose LLMs to the above domain-specific recommendation tasks at scale, RecGPT incorporates a multi-stage training paradigm, which integrates reasoning-enhanced pre-alignment and self-training evolution, guided by a Human-LLM cooperative judge system. Currently, RecGPT has been fully deployed on the Taobao App. Online experiments demonstrate that RecGPT achieves consistent performance gains across stakeholders: users benefit from increased content diversity and satisfaction, merchants and the platform gain greater exposure and conversions. These comprehensive improvement results across all stakeholders validates that LLM-driven, intent-centric design can foster a more sustainable and mutually beneficial recommendation ecosystem.

  • 53 authors
·
Jul 30, 2025 2

MedGemma Technical Report

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significant potential in healthcare applications, but its training and deployment faces challenges due to healthcare's diverse data, complex tasks, and the need to preserve privacy. Foundation models that perform well on medical tasks and require less task-specific tuning data are critical to accelerate the development of healthcare AI applications. We introduce MedGemma, a collection of medical vision-language foundation models based on Gemma 3 4B and 27B. MedGemma demonstrates advanced medical understanding and reasoning on images and text, significantly exceeding the performance of similar-sized generative models and approaching the performance of task-specific models, while maintaining the general capabilities of the Gemma 3 base models. For out-of-distribution tasks, MedGemma achieves 2.6-10% improvement on medical multimodal question answering, 15.5-18.1% improvement on chest X-ray finding classification, and 10.8% improvement on agentic evaluations compared to the base models. Fine-tuning MedGemma further improves performance in subdomains, reducing errors in electronic health record information retrieval by 50% and reaching comparable performance to existing specialized state-of-the-art methods for pneumothorax classification and histopathology patch classification. We additionally introduce MedSigLIP, a medically-tuned vision encoder derived from SigLIP. MedSigLIP powers the visual understanding capabilities of MedGemma and as an encoder achieves comparable or better performance than specialized medical image encoders. Taken together, the MedGemma collection provides a strong foundation of medical image and text capabilities, with potential to significantly accelerate medical research and development of downstream applications. The MedGemma collection, including tutorials and model weights, can be found at https://goo.gle/medgemma.

  • 80 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025 2

LIT-RAGBench: Benchmarking Generator Capabilities of Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a framework in which a Generator, such as a Large Language Model (LLM), produces answers by retrieving documents from an external collection using a Retriever. In practice, Generators must integrate evidence from long contexts, perform multi-step reasoning, interpret tables, and abstain when evidence is missing. However, existing benchmarks for Generators provide limited coverage, with none enabling simultaneous evaluation of multiple capabilities under unified conditions. To bridge the gap between existing evaluations and practical use, we introduce LIT-RAGBench (the Logic, Integration, Table, Reasoning, and Abstention RAG Generator Benchmark), which defines five categories: Integration, Reasoning, Logic, Table, and Abstention, each further divided into practical evaluation aspects. LIT-RAGBench systematically covers patterns combining multiple aspects across categories. By using fictional entities and scenarios, LIT-RAGBench evaluates answers grounded in the provided external documents. The dataset consists of 114 human-constructed Japanese questions and an English version generated by machine translation with human curation. We use LLM-as-a-Judge for scoring and report category-wise and overall accuracy. Across API-based and open-weight models, no model exceeds 90% overall accuracy. By making strengths and weaknesses measurable within each category, LIT-RAGBench serves as a valuable metric for model selection in practical RAG deployments and for building RAG-specialized models. We release LIT-RAGBench, including the dataset and evaluation code, at https://github.com/Koki-Itai/LIT-RAGBench.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 6

QZhou-Embedding Technical Report

We present QZhou-Embedding, a general-purpose contextual text embedding model with exceptional text representation capabilities. Built upon the Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct foundation model, we designed a unified multi-task framework comprising specialized data transformation and training strategies. The data transformation scheme enables the incorporation of more diverse textual training datasets, while the task-specific training strategies enhance model learning efficiency. We developed a data synthesis pipeline leveraging LLM API, incorporating techniques such as paraphrasing, augmentation, and hard negative example generation to improve the semantic richness and sample difficulty of the training set. Additionally, we employ a two-stage training strategy, comprising initial retrieval-focused pretraining followed by full-task fine-tuning, enabling the embedding model to extend its capabilities based on robust retrieval performance. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the MTEB and CMTEB benchmarks, ranking first on both leaderboards (August 27 2025), and simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art performance on tasks including reranking, clustering, etc. Our findings demonstrate that higher-quality, more diverse data is crucial for advancing retrieval model performance, and that leveraging LLMs generative capabilities can further optimize data quality for embedding model breakthroughs. Our model weights are released on HuggingFace under Apache 2.0 license. For reproducibility, we provide evaluation code and instructions on GitHub.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 29, 2025

MM-R5: MultiModal Reasoning-Enhanced ReRanker via Reinforcement Learning for Document Retrieval

Multimodal document retrieval systems enable information access across text, images, and layouts, benefiting various domains like document-based question answering, report analysis, and interactive content summarization. Rerankers improve retrieval precision by reordering retrieved candidates. However, current multimodal reranking methods remain underexplored, with significant room for improvement in both training strategies and overall effectiveness. Moreover, the lack of explicit reasoning makes it difficult to analyze and optimize these methods further. In this paper, We propose MM-R5, a MultiModal Reasoning-Enhanced ReRanker via Reinforcement Learning for Document Retrieval, aiming to provide a more effective and reliable solution for multimodal reranking tasks. MM-R5 is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the SFT stage, we focus on improving instruction-following and guiding the model to generate complete and high-quality reasoning chains. To support this, we introduce a novel data construction strategy that produces rich, high-quality reasoning data. In the RL stage, we design a task-specific reward framework, including a reranking reward tailored for multimodal candidates and a composite template-based reward to further refine reasoning quality. We conduct extensive experiments on MMDocIR, a challenging public benchmark spanning multiple domains. MM-R5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on most metrics and delivers comparable results to much larger models on the remaining ones. Moreover, compared to the best retrieval-only method, MM-R5 improves recall@1 by over 4%. These results validate the effectiveness of our reasoning-enhanced training pipeline.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14, 2025

SuperCoder2.0: Technical Report on Exploring the feasibility of LLMs as Autonomous Programmer

We present SuperCoder2.0, an advanced autonomous system designed to enhance software development through artificial intelligence. The system combines an AI-native development approach with intelligent agents to enable fully autonomous coding. Key focus areas include a retry mechanism with error output traceback, comprehensive code rewriting and replacement using Abstract Syntax Tree (ast) parsing to minimize linting issues, code embedding technique for retrieval-augmented generation, and a focus on localizing methods for problem-solving rather than identifying specific line numbers. The methodology employs a three-step hierarchical search space reduction approach for code base navigation and bug localization:utilizing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and a Repository File Level Map to identify candidate files, (2) narrowing down to the most relevant files using a File Level Schematic Map, and (3) extracting 'relevant locations' within these files. Code editing is performed through a two-part module comprising CodeGeneration and CodeEditing, which generates multiple solutions at different temperature values and replaces entire methods or classes to maintain code integrity. A feedback loop executes repository-level test cases to validate and refine solutions. Experiments conducted on the SWE-bench Lite dataset demonstrate SuperCoder2.0's effectiveness, achieving correct file localization in 84.33% of cases within the top 5 candidates and successfully resolving 34% of test instances. This performance places SuperCoder2.0 fourth globally on the SWE-bench leaderboard. The system's ability to handle diverse repositories and problem types highlights its potential as a versatile tool for autonomous software development. Future work will focus on refining the code editing process and exploring advanced embedding models for improved natural language to code mapping.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 17, 2024

Fathom-DeepResearch: Unlocking Long Horizon Information Retrieval and Synthesis for SLMs

Tool-integrated reasoning has emerged as a key focus for enabling agentic applications. Among these, DeepResearch Agents have gained significant attention for their strong performance on complex, open-ended information-seeking tasks. We introduce Fathom-DeepResearch, an agentic system composed of two specialized models. The first is Fathom-Search-4B, a DeepSearch model trained from Qwen3-4B and optimized for evidence-based investigation through live web search and targeted webpage querying. Its training combines three advances: (i) DUETQA, a 5K-sample dataset generated via multi-agent self-play that enforces strict web-search dependence and heterogeneous source grounding; (ii) RAPO, a zero-overhead extension of GRPO that stabilizes multi-turn Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards through curriculum pruning, reward-aware advantage scaling, and per-prompt replay buffers; and (iii) a steerable step-level reward that classifies each tool call by cognitive behavior and marginal utility, enabling explicit control over search trajectory breadth, depth, and horizon. These improvements enable reliable extension of tool-calling beyond 20 calls when warranted. The second is Fathom-Synthesizer-4B, trained from Qwen3-4B, which converts multi-turn DeepSearch traces into structured, citation-dense DeepResearch Reports for comprehensive synthesis. Evaluated on DeepSearch benchmarks (SimpleQA, FRAMES, WebWalker, Seal0, MuSiQue) and DeepResearch-Bench, the system achieves state-of-the-art performance in the open-weights category while demonstrating strong generalization to diverse reasoning tasks including HLE, AIME-25, GPQA-Diamond, and MedQA.

FractalAIResearch Fractal AI Research
·
Sep 28, 2025 2

StreamingClaw Technical Report

Applications such as embodied intelligence rely on a real-time perception-decision-action closed loop, posing stringent challenges for streaming video understanding. However, current agents suffer from fragmented capabilities, such as supporting only offline video understanding, lacking long-term multimodal memory mechanisms, or struggling to achieve real-time reasoning and proactive interaction under streaming inputs. These shortcomings have become a key bottleneck for preventing them from sustaining perception, making real-time decisions, and executing actions in real-world environments. To alleviate these issues, we propose StreamingClaw, a unified agent framework for streaming video understanding and embodied intelligence. It is also an OpenClaw-compatible framework that supports real-time, multimodal streaming interaction. StreamingClaw integrates five core capabilities: (1) It supports real-time streaming reasoning. (2) It supports reasoning about future events and proactive interaction under the online evolution of interaction objectives. (3) It supports multimodal long-term storage, hierarchical evolution, and efficient retrieval of shared memory across multiple agents. (4) It supports a closed-loop of perception-decision-action. In addition to conventional tools and skills, it also provides streaming tools and action-centric skills tailored for real-world physical environments. (5) It is compatible with the OpenClaw framework, allowing it to fully leverage the resources and support of the open-source community. With these designs, StreamingClaw integrates online real-time reasoning, multimodal long-term memory, and proactive interaction within a unified framework. Moreover, by translating decisions into executable actions, it enables direct control of the physical world, supporting practical deployment of embodied interaction.

Leum-VL Technical Report

A short video succeeds not simply because of what it shows, but because of how it schedules attention -- yet current multimodal models lack the structural grammar to parse or produce this organization. Existing models can describe scenes, answer event-centric questions, and read on-screen text, but they are far less reliable at identifying timeline-grounded units such as hooks, cut rationales, shot-induced tension, and platform-facing packaging cues. We propose SV6D (Structured Video in Six Dimensions), inspired by professional storyboard practice in film and television production, a representation framework that decomposes internet-native video into six complementary structural dimensions -- subject, aesthetics, camera language, editing, narrative, and dissemination -- with each label tied to physically observable evidence on the timeline. We formalize a unified optimization objective over SV6D that combines Hungarian-matched temporal alignment, dimension-wise semantic label distance, and quality regularization. Building on this framework, we present Leum-VL-8B, an 8B video-language model that realizes the SV6D objective through an expert-driven post-training pipeline, further refined through verifiable reinforcement learning on perception-oriented tasks. Leum-VL-8B achieves 70.8 on VideoMME (w/o subtitles), 70.0 on MVBench, and 61.6 on MotionBench, while remaining competitive on general multimodal evaluations such as MMBench-EN. We also construct FeedBench, a benchmark for structure-sensitive short-video understanding. Our results indicate that the missing layer in video AI is not pixel generation but structural representation: grounded on the timeline, linked to visible evidence, and directly consumable by downstream workflows such as editing, retrieval, recommendation, and generation control, including text-heavy internet video formats with overlays and image-text layouts.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20 1

MonkeyOCR v1.5 Technical Report: Unlocking Robust Document Parsing for Complex Patterns

Document parsing is a core task in document intelligence, supporting applications such as information extraction, retrieval-augmented generation, and automated document analysis. However, real-world documents often feature complex layouts with multi-level tables, embedded images or formulas, and cross-page structures, which remain challenging for existing OCR systems. We introduce MonkeyOCR v1.5, a unified vision-language framework that enhances both layout understanding and content recognition through a two-stage parsing pipeline. The first stage employs a large multimodal model to jointly predict document layout and reading order, leveraging visual information to ensure structural and sequential consistency. The second stage performs localized recognition of text, formulas, and tables within detected regions, maintaining high visual fidelity while reducing error propagation. To address complex table structures, we propose a visual consistency-based reinforcement learning scheme that evaluates recognition quality via render-and-compare alignment, improving structural accuracy without manual annotations. Additionally, two specialized modules, Image-Decoupled Table Parsing and Type-Guided Table Merging, are introduced to enable reliable parsing of tables containing embedded images and reconstruction of tables crossing pages or columns. Comprehensive experiments on OmniDocBench v1.5 demonstrate that MonkeyOCR v1.5 achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming PPOCR-VL and MinerU 2.5 while showing exceptional robustness in visually complex document scenarios.

  • 20 authors
·
Nov 13, 2025

HetaRAG: Hybrid Deep Retrieval-Augmented Generation across Heterogeneous Data Stores

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a dominant paradigm for mitigating knowledge hallucination and staleness in large language models (LLMs) while preserving data security. By retrieving relevant evidence from private, domain-specific corpora and injecting it into carefully engineered prompts, RAG delivers trustworthy responses without the prohibitive cost of fine-tuning. Traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are text-only and often rely on a single storage backend, most commonly a vector database. In practice, this monolithic design suffers from unavoidable trade-offs: vector search captures semantic similarity yet loses global context; knowledge graphs excel at relational precision but struggle with recall; full-text indexes are fast and exact yet semantically blind; and relational engines such as MySQL provide strong transactional guarantees but no semantic understanding. We argue that these heterogeneous retrieval paradigms are complementary, and propose a principled fusion scheme to orchestrate them synergistically, mitigating the weaknesses of any single modality. In this work we introduce HetaRAG, a hybrid, deep-retrieval augmented generation framework that orchestrates cross-modal evidence from heterogeneous data stores. We plan to design a system that unifies vector indices, knowledge graphs, full-text engines, and structured databases into a single retrieval plane, dynamically routing and fusing evidence to maximize recall, precision, and contextual fidelity. To achieve this design goal, we carried out preliminary explorations and constructed an initial RAG pipeline; this technical report provides a brief overview. The partial code is available at https://github.com/KnowledgeXLab/HetaRAG.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025

Qwen3-VL Technical Report

We introduce Qwen3-VL, the most capable vision-language model in the Qwen series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. It natively supports interleaved contexts of up to 256K tokens, seamlessly integrating text, images, and video. The model family includes both dense (2B/4B/8B/32B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B/235B-A22B) variants to accommodate diverse latency-quality trade-offs. Qwen3-VL delivers three core pillars: (i) markedly stronger pure-text understanding, surpassing comparable text-only backbones in several cases; (ii) robust long-context comprehension with a native 256K-token window for both text and interleaved multimodal inputs, enabling faithful retention, retrieval, and cross-referencing across long documents and videos; and (iii) advanced multimodal reasoning across single-image, multi-image, and video tasks, demonstrating leading performance on comprehensive evaluations such as MMMU and visual-math benchmarks (e.g., MathVista and MathVision). Architecturally, we introduce three key upgrades: (i) an enhanced interleaved-MRoPE for stronger spatial-temporal modeling across images and video; (ii) DeepStack integration, which effectively leverages multi-level ViT features to tighten vision-language alignment; and (iii) text-based time alignment for video, evolving from T-RoPE to explicit textual timestamp alignment for more precise temporal grounding. Under comparable token budgets and latency constraints, Qwen3-VL achieves superior performance in both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. We envision Qwen3-VL serving as a foundational engine for image-grounded reasoning, agentic decision-making, and multimodal code intelligence in real-world workflows.

Qwen Qwen
·
Nov 26, 2025 4

Intensive Vision-guided Network for Radiology Report Generation

Automatic radiology report generation is booming due to its huge application potential for the healthcare industry. However, existing computer vision and natural language processing approaches to tackle this problem are limited in two aspects. First, when extracting image features, most of them neglect multi-view reasoning in vision and model single-view structure of medical images, such as space-view or channel-view. However, clinicians rely on multi-view imaging information for comprehensive judgment in daily clinical diagnosis. Second, when generating reports, they overlook context reasoning with multi-modal information and focus on pure textual optimization utilizing retrieval-based methods. We aim to address these two issues by proposing a model that better simulates clinicians' perspectives and generates more accurate reports. Given the above limitation in feature extraction, we propose a Globally-intensive Attention (GIA) module in the medical image encoder to simulate and integrate multi-view vision perception. GIA aims to learn three types of vision perception: depth view, space view, and pixel view. On the other hand, to address the above problem in report generation, we explore how to involve multi-modal signals to generate precisely matched reports, i.e., how to integrate previously predicted words with region-aware visual content in next word prediction. Specifically, we design a Visual Knowledge-guided Decoder (VKGD), which can adaptively consider how much the model needs to rely on visual information and previously predicted text to assist next word prediction. Hence, our final Intensive Vision-guided Network (IVGN) framework includes a GIA-guided Visual Encoder and the VKGD. Experiments on two commonly-used datasets IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate the superior ability of our method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 6, 2024

When to use Graphs in RAG: A Comprehensive Analysis for Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge. It leverages graphs to model the hierarchical structure between specific concepts, enabling more coherent and effective knowledge retrieval for accurate reasoning.Despite its conceptual promise, recent studies report that GraphRAG frequently underperforms vanilla RAG on many real-world tasks. This raises a critical question: Is GraphRAG really effective, and in which scenarios do graph structures provide measurable benefits for RAG systems? To address this, we propose GraphRAG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate GraphRAG models onboth hierarchical knowledge retrieval and deep contextual reasoning. GraphRAG-Bench features a comprehensive dataset with tasks of increasing difficulty, coveringfact retrieval, complex reasoning, contextual summarization, and creative generation, and a systematic evaluation across the entire pipeline, from graph constructionand knowledge retrieval to final generation. Leveraging this novel benchmark, we systematically investigate the conditions when GraphRAG surpasses traditional RAG and the underlying reasons for its success, offering guidelines for its practical application. All related resources and analyses are collected for the community at https://github.com/GraphRAG-Bench/GraphRAG-Benchmark.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 5, 2025

MoRE: Multi-Modal Contrastive Pre-training with Transformers on X-Rays, ECGs, and Diagnostic Report

In this paper, we introduce a novel Multi-Modal Contrastive Pre-training Framework that synergistically combines X-rays, electrocardiograms (ECGs), and radiology/cardiology reports. Our approach leverages transformers to encode these diverse modalities into a unified representation space, aiming to enhance diagnostic accuracy and facilitate comprehensive patient assessments. We utilize LoRA-Peft to significantly reduce trainable parameters in the LLM and incorporate recent linear attention dropping strategy in the Vision Transformer(ViT) for smoother attention. Furthermore, we provide novel multimodal attention explanations and retrieval for our model. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose an integrated model that combines X-ray, ECG, and Radiology/Cardiology Report with this approach. By utilizing contrastive loss, MoRE effectively aligns modality-specific features into a coherent embedding, which supports various downstream tasks such as zero-shot classification and multimodal retrieval. Employing our proposed methodology, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the Mimic-IV, CheXpert, Edema Severity, and PtbXl downstream datasets, surpassing existing multimodal approaches. Our proposed framework shows significant improvements in capturing intricate inter-modal relationships and its robustness in medical diagnosis that establishes a framework for future research in multimodal learning in the healthcare sector.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024

Exploring the Capabilities of LLM Encoders for Image-Text Retrieval in Chest X-rays

Vision-language pretraining has advanced image-text alignment, yet progress in radiology remains constrained by the heterogeneity of clinical reports, including abbreviations, impression-only notes, and stylistic variability. Unlike general-domain settings where more data often leads to better performance, naively scaling to large collections of noisy reports can plateau or even degrade model learning. We ask whether large language model (LLM) encoders can provide robust clinical representations that transfer across diverse styles and better guide image-text alignment. We introduce LLM2VEC4CXR, a domain-adapted LLM encoder for chest X-ray reports, and LLM2CLIP4CXR, a dual-tower framework that couples this encoder with a vision backbone. LLM2VEC4CXR improves clinical text understanding over BERT-based baselines, handles abbreviations and style variation, and achieves strong clinical alignment on report-level metrics. LLM2CLIP4CXR leverages these embeddings to boost retrieval accuracy and clinically oriented scores, with stronger cross-dataset generalization than prior medical CLIP variants. Trained on 1.6M CXR studies from public and private sources with heterogeneous and noisy reports, our models demonstrate that robustness -- not scale alone -- is the key to effective multimodal learning. We release models to support further research in medical image-text representation learning.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 17, 2025

Structural Entities Extraction and Patient Indications Incorporation for Chest X-ray Report Generation

The automated generation of imaging reports proves invaluable in alleviating the workload of radiologists. A clinically applicable reports generation algorithm should demonstrate its effectiveness in producing reports that accurately describe radiology findings and attend to patient-specific indications. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, Structural Entities extraction and patient indications Incorporation (SEI) for chest X-ray report generation. Specifically, we employ a structural entities extraction (SEE) approach to eliminate presentation-style vocabulary in reports and improve the quality of factual entity sequences. This reduces the noise in the following cross-modal alignment module by aligning X-ray images with factual entity sequences in reports, thereby enhancing the precision of cross-modal alignment and further aiding the model in gradient-free retrieval of similar historical cases. Subsequently, we propose a cross-modal fusion network to integrate information from X-ray images, similar historical cases, and patient-specific indications. This process allows the text decoder to attend to discriminative features of X-ray images, assimilate historical diagnostic information from similar cases, and understand the examination intention of patients. This, in turn, assists in triggering the text decoder to produce high-quality reports. Experiments conducted on MIMIC-CXR validate the superiority of SEI over state-of-the-art approaches on both natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics.

  • 8 authors
·
May 22, 2024

FinCPRG: A Bidirectional Generation Pipeline for Hierarchical Queries and Rich Relevance in Financial Chinese Passage Retrieval

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in constructing passage retrieval datasets. However, existing methods still face limitations in expressing cross-doc query needs and controlling annotation quality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a bidirectional generation pipeline, which aims to generate 3-level hierarchical queries for both intra-doc and cross-doc scenarios and mine additional relevance labels on top of direct mapping annotation. The pipeline introduces two query generation methods: bottom-up from single-doc text and top-down from multi-doc titles. The bottom-up method uses LLMs to disassemble and generate structured queries at both sentence-level and passage-level simultaneously from intra-doc passages. The top-down approach incorporates three key financial elements--industry, topic, and time--to divide report titles into clusters and prompts LLMs to generate topic-level queries from each cluster. For relevance annotation, our pipeline not only relies on direct mapping annotation from the generation relationship but also implements an indirect positives mining method to enrich the relevant query-passage pairs. Using this pipeline, we constructed a Financial Passage Retrieval Generated dataset (FinCPRG) from almost 1.3k Chinese financial research reports, which includes hierarchical queries and rich relevance labels. Through evaluations of mined relevance labels, benchmarking and training experiments, we assessed the quality of FinCPRG and validated its effectiveness as a passage retrieval dataset for both training and benchmarking.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025

IoDResearch: Deep Research on Private Heterogeneous Data via the Internet of Data

The rapid growth of multi-source, heterogeneous, and multimodal scientific data has increasingly exposed the limitations of traditional data management. Most existing DeepResearch (DR) efforts focus primarily on web search while overlooking local private data. Consequently, these frameworks exhibit low retrieval efficiency for private data and fail to comply with the FAIR principles, ultimately resulting in inefficiency and limited reusability. To this end, we propose IoDResearch (Internet of Data Research), a private data-centric Deep Research framework that operationalizes the Internet of Data paradigm. IoDResearch encapsulates heterogeneous resources as FAIR-compliant digital objects, and further refines them into atomic knowledge units and knowledge graphs, forming a heterogeneous graph index for multi-granularity retrieval. On top of this representation, a multi-agent system supports both reliable question answering and structured scientific report generation. Furthermore, we establish the IoD DeepResearch Benchmark to systematically evaluate both data representation and Deep Research capabilities in IoD scenarios. Experimental results on retrieval, QA, and report-writing tasks show that IoDResearch consistently surpasses representative RAG and Deep Research baselines. Overall, IoDResearch demonstrates the feasibility of private-data-centric Deep Research under the IoD paradigm, paving the way toward more trustworthy, reusable, and automated scientific discovery.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

Luxical: High-Speed Lexical-Dense Text Embeddings

Frontier language model quality increasingly hinges on our ability to organize web-scale text corpora for training. Today's dominant tools trade off speed and flexibility: lexical classifiers (e.g., FastText) are fast but limited to producing classification output scores, while the vector-valued outputs of transformer text embedding models flexibly support numerous workflows (e.g., clustering, classification, and retrieval) but are computationally expensive to produce. We introduce Luxical, a library for high-speed "lexical-dense" text embeddings that aims to recover the best properties of both approaches for web-scale text organization. Luxical combines sparse TF--IDF features, a small ReLU network, and a knowledge distillation training regimen to approximate large transformer embedding models at a fraction of their operational cost. In this technical report, we describe the Luxical architecture and training objective and evaluate a concrete Luxical model in two disparate applications: a targeted webcrawl document retrieval test and an end-to-end language model data curation task grounded in text classification. In these tasks we demonstrate speedups ranging from 3x to 100x over varying-sized neural baselines, and comparable to FastText model inference during the data curation task. On these evaluations, the tested Luxical model illustrates favorable compute/quality trade-offs for large-scale text organization, matching the quality of neural baselines. Luxical is available as open-source software at https://github.com/datologyai/luxical.

  • 33 authors
·
Dec 9, 2025

A Survey of Medical Vision-and-Language Applications and Their Techniques

Medical vision-and-language models (MVLMs) have attracted substantial interest due to their capability to offer a natural language interface for interpreting complex medical data. Their applications are versatile and have the potential to improve diagnostic accuracy and decision-making for individual patients while also contributing to enhanced public health monitoring, disease surveillance, and policy-making through more efficient analysis of large data sets. MVLMS integrate natural language processing with medical images to enable a more comprehensive and contextual understanding of medical images alongside their corresponding textual information. Unlike general vision-and-language models trained on diverse, non-specialized datasets, MVLMs are purpose-built for the medical domain, automatically extracting and interpreting critical information from medical images and textual reports to support clinical decision-making. Popular clinical applications of MVLMs include automated medical report generation, medical visual question answering, medical multimodal segmentation, diagnosis and prognosis and medical image-text retrieval. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of MVLMs and the various medical tasks to which they have been applied. We conduct a detailed analysis of various vision-and-language model architectures, focusing on their distinct strategies for cross-modal integration/exploitation of medical visual and textual features. We also examine the datasets used for these tasks and compare the performance of different models based on standardized evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we highlight potential challenges and summarize future research trends and directions. The full collection of papers and codes is available at: https://github.com/YtongXie/Medical-Vision-and-Language-Tasks-and-Methodologies-A-Survey.

  • 12 authors
·
Nov 18, 2024

Towards a clinically accessible radiology foundation model: open-access and lightweight, with automated evaluation

The scaling laws and extraordinary performance of large foundation models motivate the development and utilization of such models in biomedicine. However, despite early promising results on some biomedical benchmarks, there are still major challenges that need to be addressed before these models can be used in real-world clinics. Frontier general-domain models such as GPT-4V still have significant performance gaps in multimodal biomedical applications. More importantly, less-acknowledged pragmatic issues, including accessibility, model cost, and tedious manual evaluation make it hard for clinicians to use state-of-the-art large models directly on private patient data. Here, we explore training open-source small multimodal models (SMMs) to bridge competency gaps for unmet clinical needs in radiology. To maximize data efficiency, we adopt a modular approach by incorporating state-of-the-art pre-trained models for image and text modalities, and focusing on training a lightweight adapter to ground each modality to the text embedding space, as exemplified by LLaVA-Med. For training, we assemble a large dataset of over 697 thousand radiology image-text pairs. For evaluation, we propose CheXprompt, a GPT-4-based metric for factuality evaluation, and demonstrate its parity with expert evaluation. For best practice, we conduct a systematic ablation study on various choices in data engineering and multimodal training. The resulting LlaVA-Rad (7B) model attains state-of-the-art results on standard radiology tasks such as report generation and cross-modal retrieval, even outperforming much larger models such as GPT-4V and Med-PaLM M (84B). The inference of LlaVA-Rad is fast and can be performed on a single V100 GPU in private settings, offering a promising state-of-the-art tool for real-world clinical applications.

  • 27 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

A Disease-Centric Vision-Language Foundation Model for Precision Oncology in Kidney Cancer

The non-invasive assessment of increasingly incidentally discovered renal masses is a critical challenge in urologic oncology, where diagnostic uncertainty frequently leads to the overtreatment of benign or indolent tumors. In this study, we developed and validated RenalCLIP using a dataset of 27,866 CT scans from 8,809 patients across nine Chinese medical centers and the public TCIA cohort, a visual-language foundation model for characterization, diagnosis and prognosis of renal mass. The model was developed via a two-stage pre-training strategy that first enhances the image and text encoders with domain-specific knowledge before aligning them through a contrastive learning objective, to create robust representations for superior generalization and diagnostic precision. RenalCLIP achieved better performance and superior generalizability across 10 core tasks spanning the full clinical workflow of kidney cancer, including anatomical assessment, diagnostic classification, and survival prediction, compared with other state-of-the-art general-purpose CT foundation models. Especially, for complicated task like recurrence-free survival prediction in the TCIA cohort, RenalCLIP achieved a C-index of 0.726, representing a substantial improvement of approximately 20% over the leading baselines. Furthermore, RenalCLIP's pre-training imparted remarkable data efficiency; in the diagnostic classification task, it only needs 20% training data to achieve the peak performance of all baseline models even after they were fully fine-tuned on 100% of the data. Additionally, it achieved superior performance in report generation, image-text retrieval and zero-shot diagnosis tasks. Our findings establish that RenalCLIP provides a robust tool with the potential to enhance diagnostic accuracy, refine prognostic stratification, and personalize the management of patients with kidney cancer.

  • 20 authors
·
Aug 22, 2025

PathAlign: A vision-language model for whole slide images in histopathology

Microscopic interpretation of histopathology images underlies many important diagnostic and treatment decisions. While advances in vision-language modeling raise new opportunities for analysis of such images, the gigapixel-scale size of whole slide images (WSIs) introduces unique challenges. Additionally, pathology reports simultaneously highlight key findings from small regions while also aggregating interpretation across multiple slides, often making it difficult to create robust image-text pairs. As such, pathology reports remain a largely untapped source of supervision in computational pathology, with most efforts relying on region-of-interest annotations or self-supervision at the patch-level. In this work, we develop a vision-language model based on the BLIP-2 framework using WSIs paired with curated text from pathology reports. This enables applications utilizing a shared image-text embedding space, such as text or image retrieval for finding cases of interest, as well as integration of the WSI encoder with a frozen large language model (LLM) for WSI-based generative text capabilities such as report generation or AI-in-the-loop interactions. We utilize a de-identified dataset of over 350,000 WSIs and diagnostic text pairs, spanning a wide range of diagnoses, procedure types, and tissue types. We present pathologist evaluation of text generation and text retrieval using WSI embeddings, as well as results for WSI classification and workflow prioritization (slide-level triaging). Model-generated text for WSIs was rated by pathologists as accurate, without clinically significant error or omission, for 78% of WSIs on average. This work demonstrates exciting potential capabilities for language-aligned WSI embeddings.

  • 17 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024

DeepResearchGym: A Free, Transparent, and Reproducible Evaluation Sandbox for Deep Research

Deep research systems represent an emerging class of agentic information retrieval methods that generate comprehensive and well-supported reports to complex queries. However, most existing frameworks rely on dynamic commercial search APIs, which pose reproducibility and transparency challenges in addition to their cost. To address these limitations, we introduce DeepResearchGym, an open-source sandbox that combines a reproducible search API with a rigorous evaluation protocol for benchmarking deep research systems. The API indexes large-scale public web corpora, namely ClueWeb22 and FineWeb, using a state-of-the-art dense retriever and approximate nearest neighbor search via DiskANN. It achieves lower latency than popular commercial APIs while ensuring stable document rankings across runs, and is freely available for research use. To evaluate deep research systems' outputs, we extend the Researchy Questions benchmark with automatic metrics through LLM-as-a-judge assessments to measure alignment with users' information needs, retrieval faithfulness, and report quality. Experimental results show that systems integrated with DeepResearchGym achieve performance comparable to those using commercial APIs, with performance rankings remaining consistent across evaluation metrics. A human evaluation study further confirms that our automatic protocol aligns with human preferences, validating the framework's ability to help support controlled assessment of deep research systems. Our code and API documentation are available at https://www.deepresearchgym.ai.

  • 11 authors
·
May 25, 2025 2

MedMO: Grounding and Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Images

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have rapidly advanced, yet their adoption in medicine remains limited by gaps in domain coverage, modality alignment, and grounded reasoning. In this work, we introduce MedMO, a medical foundation model built upon a generalized MLLM architecture and trained exclusively on large-scale, domain-specific data. MedMO follows a multi-stage training recipe: (i) cross-modal pretraining to align heterogeneous visual encoders with a medical language backbone; (ii) instruction tuning on multi-task supervision that spans captioning, VQA, report generation, retrieval, and grounded disease localization with bounding boxes; and (iii) reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards that combine factuality checks with a box-level GIoU reward to strengthen spatial grounding and step-by-step reasoning in complex clinical scenarios. MedMO consistently outperforms strong open-source medical MLLMs across multiple modalities and tasks. On VQA benchmarks, MedMO achieves an average accuracy improvement of +13.7% over the baseline and performs within 1.9% of the SOTA Fleming-VL. For text-based QA, it attains +6.9% over the baseline and +14.5% over Fleming-VL. In medical report generation, MedMO delivers significant gains in both semantic and clinical accuracy. Moreover, it exhibits strong grounding capability, achieving an IoU improvement of +40.4 over the baseline and +37.0% over Fleming-VL, underscoring its robust spatial reasoning and localization performance. Evaluations across radiology, ophthalmology, and pathology-microscopy confirm MedMO's broad cross-modality generalization. We release two versions of MedMO: 4B and 8B. Project is available at https://genmilab.github.io/MedMO-Page

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 6

Merlin: A Vision Language Foundation Model for 3D Computed Tomography

Over 85 million computed tomography (CT) scans are performed annually in the US, of which approximately one quarter focus on the abdomen. Given the current radiologist shortage, there is a large impetus to use artificial intelligence to alleviate the burden of interpreting these complex imaging studies. Prior state-of-the-art approaches for automated medical image interpretation leverage vision language models (VLMs). However, current medical VLMs are generally limited to 2D images and short reports, and do not leverage electronic health record (EHR) data for supervision. We introduce Merlin - a 3D VLM that we train using paired CT scans (6+ million images from 15,331 CTs), EHR diagnosis codes (1.8+ million codes), and radiology reports (6+ million tokens). We evaluate Merlin on 6 task types and 752 individual tasks. The non-adapted (off-the-shelf) tasks include zero-shot findings classification (31 findings), phenotype classification (692 phenotypes), and zero-shot cross-modal retrieval (image to findings and image to impressions), while model adapted tasks include 5-year disease prediction (6 diseases), radiology report generation, and 3D semantic segmentation (20 organs). We perform internal validation on a test set of 5,137 CTs, and external validation on 7,000 clinical CTs and on two public CT datasets (VerSe, TotalSegmentator). Beyond these clinically-relevant evaluations, we assess the efficacy of various network architectures and training strategies to depict that Merlin has favorable performance to existing task-specific baselines. We derive data scaling laws to empirically assess training data needs for requisite downstream task performance. Furthermore, unlike conventional VLMs that require hundreds of GPUs for training, we perform all training on a single GPU.

  • 31 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024

A data- and compute-efficient chest X-ray foundation model beyond aggressive scaling

Foundation models for medical imaging are typically pretrained on increasingly large datasets, following a "scale-at-all-costs" paradigm. However, this strategy faces two critical challenges: large-scale medical datasets often contain substantial redundancy and severe class imbalance that bias representation learning toward over-represented patterns, and indiscriminate training regardless of heterogeneity in data quality incurs considerable computational inefficiency. Here we demonstrate that active, principled data curation during pretraining can serve as a viable, cost-effective alternative to brute-force dataset enlargement. We introduce CheXficient, a chest X-ray (CXR) foundation model that selectively prioritizes informative training samples. CheXficient is pretrained on only 22.7% of 1,235,004 paired CXR images and reports while consuming under 27.3% of the total compute budget, yet achieving comparable or superior performance to its full-data counterpart and other large-scale pretrained models. We assess CheXficient across 20 individual benchmarks spanning 5 task types, including non-adapted off-the-shelf evaluations (zero-shot findings classification and crossmodal retrieval) and adapted downstream tasks (disease prediction, semantic segmentation, and radiology report generation). Further analyses show that CheXficient systematically prioritizes under-represented training samples, improving generalizability on long-tailed or rare conditions. Overall, our work offers practical insights into the data and computation demands for efficient pretraining and downstream adaptation of medical vision-language foundation models.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 26

VELVET-Med: Vision and Efficient Language Pre-training for Volumetric Imaging Tasks in Medicine

Vision-and-language models (VLMs) have been increasingly explored in the medical domain, particularly following the success of CLIP in general domain. However, unlike the relatively straightforward pairing of 2D images and text, curating large-scale paired data in the medical field for volumetric modalities such as CT scans remains a challenging and time-intensive process. This difficulty often limits the performance on downstream tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel vision-language pre-training (VLP) framework, termed as VELVET-Med, specifically designed for limited volumetric data such as 3D CT and associated radiology reports. Instead of relying on large-scale data collection, our method focuses on the development of effective pre-training objectives and model architectures. The key contributions are: 1) We incorporate uni-modal self-supervised learning into VLP framework, which are often underexplored in the existing literature. 2) We propose a novel language encoder, termed as TriBERT, for learning multi-level textual semantics. 3) We devise the hierarchical contrastive learning to capture multi-level vision-language correspondence. Using only 38,875 scan-report pairs, our approach seeks to uncover rich spatial and semantic relationships embedded in volumetric medical images and corresponding clinical narratives, thereby enhancing the generalization ability of the learned encoders. The resulting encoders exhibit strong transferability, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of downstream tasks, including 3D segmentation, cross-modal retrieval, visual question answering, and report generation.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 16, 2025

Seeing Like Radiologists: Context- and Gaze-Guided Vision-Language Pretraining for Chest X-rays

Despite recent advances in medical vision-language pretraining, existing models still struggle to capture the diagnostic workflow: radiographs are typically treated as context-agnostic images, while radiologists' gaze -- a crucial cue for visual reasoning -- remains largely underexplored by existing methods. These limitations hinder the modeling of disease-specific patterns and weaken cross-modal alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce CoGaze, a Context- and Gaze-guided vision-language pretraining framework for chest X-rays. We first propose a context-infused vision encoder that models how radiologists integrate clinical context -- including patient history, symptoms, and diagnostic intent -- to guide diagnostic reasoning. We then present a multi-level supervision paradigm that (1) enforces intra- and inter-modal semantic alignment through hybrid-positive contrastive learning, (2) injects diagnostic priors via disease-aware cross-modal representation learning, and (3) leverages radiologists' gaze as probabilistic priors to guide attention toward diagnostically salient regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoGaze consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks, achieving up to +2.0% CheXbertF1 and +1.2% BLEU2 for free-text and structured report generation, +23.2% AUROC for zero-shot classification, and +12.2% Precision@1 for image-text retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/mk-runner/CoGaze.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 26

KARL: Knowledge Agents via Reinforcement Learning

We present a system for training enterprise search agents via reinforcement learning that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse suite of hard-to-verify agentic search tasks. Our work makes four core contributions. First, we introduce KARLBench, a multi-capability evaluation suite spanning six distinct search regimes, including constraint-driven entity search, cross-document report synthesis, tabular numerical reasoning, exhaustive entity retrieval, procedural reasoning over technical documentation, and fact aggregation over internal enterprise notes. Second, we show that models trained across heterogeneous search behaviors generalize substantially better than those optimized for any single benchmark. Third, we develop an agentic synthesis pipeline that employs long-horizon reasoning and tool use to generate diverse, grounded, and high-quality training data, with iterative bootstrapping from increasingly capable models. Fourth, we propose a new post-training paradigm based on iterative large-batch off-policy RL that is sample efficient, robust to train-inference engine discrepancies, and naturally extends to multi-task training with out-of-distribution generalization. Compared to Claude 4.6 and GPT 5.2, KARL is Pareto-optimal on KARLBench across cost-quality and latency-quality trade-offs, including tasks that were out-of-distribution during training. With sufficient test-time compute, it surpasses the strongest closed models. These results show that tailored synthetic data in combination with multi-task reinforcement learning enables cost-efficient and high-performing knowledge agents for grounded reasoning.

databricks Databricks
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Mar 5 1

Dense Text Retrieval based on Pretrained Language Models: A Survey

Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking functions, the underlying retrieval models have been continually evolved with the ever-lasting technical innovation. To design effective retrieval models, a key point lies in how to learn the text representation and model the relevance matching. The recent success of pretrained language models (PLMs) sheds light on developing more capable text retrieval approaches by leveraging the excellent modeling capacity of PLMs. With powerful PLMs, we can effectively learn the representations of queries and texts in the latent representation space, and further construct the semantic matching function between the dense vectors for relevance modeling. Such a retrieval approach is referred to as dense retrieval, since it employs dense vectors (a.k.a., embeddings) to represent the texts. Considering the rapid progress on dense retrieval, in this survey, we systematically review the recent advances on PLM-based dense retrieval. Different from previous surveys on dense retrieval, we take a new perspective to organize the related work by four major aspects, including architecture, training, indexing and integration, and summarize the mainstream techniques for each aspect. We thoroughly survey the literature, and include 300+ related reference papers on dense retrieval. To support our survey, we create a website for providing useful resources, and release a code repertory and toolkit for implementing dense retrieval models. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive, practical reference focused on the major progress for dense text retrieval.

  • 4 authors
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Nov 27, 2022

Resources for Brewing BEIR: Reproducible Reference Models and an Official Leaderboard

BEIR is a benchmark dataset for zero-shot evaluation of information retrieval models across 18 different domain/task combinations. In recent years, we have witnessed the growing popularity of a representation learning approach to building retrieval models, typically using pretrained transformers in a supervised setting. This naturally begs the question: How effective are these models when presented with queries and documents that differ from the training data? Examples include searching in different domains (e.g., medical or legal text) and with different types of queries (e.g., keywords vs. well-formed questions). While BEIR was designed to answer these questions, our work addresses two shortcomings that prevent the benchmark from achieving its full potential: First, the sophistication of modern neural methods and the complexity of current software infrastructure create barriers to entry for newcomers. To this end, we provide reproducible reference implementations that cover the two main classes of approaches: learned dense and sparse models. Second, there does not exist a single authoritative nexus for reporting the effectiveness of different models on BEIR, which has led to difficulty in comparing different methods. To remedy this, we present an official self-service BEIR leaderboard that provides fair and consistent comparisons of retrieval models. By addressing both shortcomings, our work facilitates future explorations in a range of interesting research questions that BEIR enables.

  • 6 authors
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Jun 12, 2023

LitLLMs, LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?

Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially due to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Our project page including a demonstration system and toolkit can be accessed here: https://litllm.github.io.

  • 8 authors
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Dec 14, 2024

LitSearch: A Retrieval Benchmark for Scientific Literature Search

Literature search questions, such as "where can I find research on the evaluation of consistency in generated summaries?" pose significant challenges for modern search engines and retrieval systems. These questions often require a deep understanding of research concepts and the ability to reason over entire articles. In this work, we introduce LitSearch, a retrieval benchmark comprising 597 realistic literature search queries about recent ML and NLP papers. LitSearch is constructed using a combination of (1) questions generated by GPT-4 based on paragraphs containing inline citations from research papers and (2) questions about recently published papers, manually written by their authors. All LitSearch questions were manually examined or edited by experts to ensure high quality. We extensively benchmark state-of-the-art retrieval models and also evaluate two LLM-based reranking pipelines. We find a significant performance gap between BM25 and state-of-the-art dense retrievers, with a 24.8% difference in absolute recall@5. The LLM-based reranking strategies further improve the best-performing dense retriever by 4.4%. Additionally, commercial search engines and research tools like Google Search perform poorly on LitSearch, lagging behind the best dense retriever by 32 points. Taken together, these results show that LitSearch is an informative new testbed for retrieval systems while catering to a real-world use case.

  • 6 authors
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Jul 10, 2024

Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey

As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models. While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities. Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers, rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within this expanding field.

  • 8 authors
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Aug 14, 2023

Benchmarking Information Retrieval Models on Complex Retrieval Tasks

Large language models (LLMs) are incredible and versatile tools for text-based tasks that have enabled countless, previously unimaginable, applications. Retrieval models, in contrast, have not yet seen such capable general-purpose models emerge. To achieve this goal, retrieval models must be able to perform complex retrieval tasks, where queries contain multiple parts, constraints, or requirements in natural language. These tasks represent a natural progression from the simple, single-aspect queries that are used in the vast majority of existing, commonly used evaluation sets. Complex queries naturally arise as people expect search systems to handle more specific and often ambitious information requests, as is demonstrated by how people use LLM-based information systems. Despite the growing desire for retrieval models to expand their capabilities in complex retrieval tasks, there exist limited resources to assess the ability of retrieval models on a comprehensive set of diverse complex tasks. The few resources that do exist feature a limited scope and often lack realistic settings making it hard to know the true capabilities of retrieval models on complex real-world retrieval tasks. To address this shortcoming and spur innovation in next-generation retrieval models, we construct a diverse and realistic set of complex retrieval tasks and benchmark a representative set of state-of-the-art retrieval models. Additionally, we explore the impact of LLM-based query expansion and rewriting on retrieval quality. Our results show that even the best models struggle to produce high-quality retrieval results with the highest average nDCG@10 of only 0.346 and R@100 of only 0.587 across all tasks. Although LLM augmentation can help weaker models, the strongest model has decreased performance across all metrics with all rewriting techniques.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 8, 2025 2

Ragnarök: A Reusable RAG Framework and Baselines for TREC 2024 Retrieval-Augmented Generation Track

Did you try out the new Bing Search? Or maybe you fiddled around with Google AI~Overviews? These might sound familiar because the modern-day search stack has recently evolved to include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. They allow searching and incorporating real-time data into large language models (LLMs) to provide a well-informed, attributed, concise summary in contrast to the traditional search paradigm that relies on displaying a ranked list of documents. Therefore, given these recent advancements, it is crucial to have an arena to build, test, visualize, and systematically evaluate RAG-based search systems. With this in mind, we propose the TREC 2024 RAG Track to foster innovation in evaluating RAG systems. In our work, we lay out the steps we've made towards making this track a reality -- we describe the details of our reusable framework, Ragnar\"ok, explain the curation of the new MS MARCO V2.1 collection choice, release the development topics for the track, and standardize the I/O definitions which assist the end user. Next, using Ragnar\"ok, we identify and provide key industrial baselines such as OpenAI's GPT-4o or Cohere's Command R+. Further, we introduce a web-based user interface for an interactive arena allowing benchmarking pairwise RAG systems by crowdsourcing. We open-source our Ragnar\"ok framework and baselines to achieve a unified standard for future RAG systems.

  • 8 authors
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Jun 24, 2024