new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Oct 29

ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases

The chest X-ray is one of the most commonly accessible radiological examinations for screening and diagnosis of many lung diseases. A tremendous number of X-ray imaging studies accompanied by radiological reports are accumulated and stored in many modern hospitals' Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). On the other side, it is still an open question how this type of hospital-size knowledge database containing invaluable imaging informatics (i.e., loosely labeled) can be used to facilitate the data-hungry deep learning paradigms in building truly large-scale high precision computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. In this paper, we present a new chest X-ray database, namely "ChestX-ray8", which comprises 108,948 frontal-view X-ray images of 32,717 unique patients with the text-mined eight disease image labels (where each image can have multi-labels), from the associated radiological reports using natural language processing. Importantly, we demonstrate that these commonly occurring thoracic diseases can be detected and even spatially-located via a unified weakly-supervised multi-label image classification and disease localization framework, which is validated using our proposed dataset. Although the initial quantitative results are promising as reported, deep convolutional neural network based "reading chest X-rays" (i.e., recognizing and locating the common disease patterns trained with only image-level labels) remains a strenuous task for fully-automated high precision CAD systems. Data download link: https://nihcc.app.box.com/v/ChestXray-NIHCC

  • 6 authors
·
May 5, 2017

MMXU: A Multi-Modal and Multi-X-ray Understanding Dataset for Disease Progression

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown great promise in medical applications, particularly in visual question answering (MedVQA) and diagnosis from medical images. However, existing datasets and models often fail to consider critical aspects of medical diagnostics, such as the integration of historical records and the analysis of disease progression over time. In this paper, we introduce MMXU (Multimodal and MultiX-ray Understanding), a novel dataset for MedVQA that focuses on identifying changes in specific regions between two patient visits. Unlike previous datasets that primarily address single-image questions, MMXU enables multi-image questions, incorporating both current and historical patient data. We demonstrate the limitations of current LVLMs in identifying disease progression on MMXU-test, even those that perform well on traditional benchmarks. To address this, we propose a MedRecord-Augmented Generation (MAG) approach, incorporating both global and regional historical records. Our experiments show that integrating historical records significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy by at least 20\%, bridging the gap between current LVLMs and human expert performance. Additionally, we fine-tune models with MAG on MMXU-dev, which demonstrates notable improvements. We hope this work could illuminate the avenue of advancing the use of LVLMs in medical diagnostics by emphasizing the importance of historical context in interpreting medical images. Our dataset is released at https://github.com/linjiemu/MMXU{https://github.com/linjiemu/MMXU}.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 17

Towards Better Dental AI: A Multimodal Benchmark and Instruction Dataset for Panoramic X-ray Analysis

Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on general-purpose medical tasks. However, their effectiveness in specialized domains such as dentistry remains underexplored. In particular, panoramic X-rays, a widely used imaging modality in oral radiology, pose interpretative challenges due to dense anatomical structures and subtle pathological cues, which are not captured by existing medical benchmarks or instruction datasets. To this end, we introduce MMOral, the first large-scale multimodal instruction dataset and benchmark tailored for panoramic X-ray interpretation. MMOral consists of 20,563 annotated images paired with 1.3 million instruction-following instances across diverse task types, including attribute extraction, report generation, visual question answering, and image-grounded dialogue. In addition, we present MMOral-Bench, a comprehensive evaluation suite covering five key diagnostic dimensions in dentistry. We evaluate 64 LVLMs on MMOral-Bench and find that even the best-performing model, i.e., GPT-4o, only achieves 41.45% accuracy, revealing significant limitations of current models in this domain. To promote the progress of this specific domain, we also propose OralGPT, which conducts supervised fine-tuning (SFT) upon Qwen2.5-VL-7B with our meticulously curated MMOral instruction dataset. Remarkably, a single epoch of SFT yields substantial performance enhancements for LVLMs, e.g., OralGPT demonstrates a 24.73% improvement. Both MMOral and OralGPT hold significant potential as a critical foundation for intelligent dentistry and enable more clinically impactful multimodal AI systems in the dental field. The dataset, model, benchmark, and evaluation suite are available at https://github.com/isbrycee/OralGPT.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 11 2

Towards General Purpose Vision Foundation Models for Medical Image Analysis: An Experimental Study of DINOv2 on Radiology Benchmarks

The integration of deep learning systems into the medical domain has been hindered by the resource-intensive process of data annotation and the inability of these systems to generalize to different data distributions. Foundation models, which are models pre-trained on large datasets, have emerged as a solution to reduce reliance on annotated data and enhance model generalizability and robustness. DINOv2, an open-source foundation model pre-trained with self-supervised learning on 142 million curated natural images, excels in extracting general-purpose visual representations, exhibiting promising capabilities across various vision tasks. Nevertheless, a critical question remains unanswered regarding DINOv2's adaptability to radiological imaging, and the clarity on whether its features are sufficiently general to benefit radiology image analysis is yet to be established. Therefore, this study comprehensively evaluates DINOv2 for radiology, conducting over 100 experiments across diverse modalities (X-ray, CT, and MRI). Tasks include disease classification and organ segmentation on both 2D and 3D images, evaluated under different settings like kNN, few-shot learning, linear-probing, end-to-end fine-tuning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, to measure the effectiveness and generalizability of the DINOv2 feature embeddings. Comparative analyses with established medical image analysis models, U-Net and TransUnet for segmentation, and CNN and ViT models pre-trained via supervised, weakly supervised, and self-supervised learning for classification, reveal DINOv2's superior performance in segmentation tasks and competitive results in disease classification. The findings contribute insights to potential avenues for optimizing pre-training strategies for medical imaging and enhancing the broader understanding of DINOv2's role in bridging the gap between natural and radiological image analysis.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 4, 2023

Meta-Transformer: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Learning

Multimodal learning aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. Despite years of development in this field, it still remains challenging to design a unified network for processing various modalities (e.g. natural language, 2D images, 3D point clouds, audio, video, time series, tabular data) due to the inherent gaps among them. In this work, we propose a framework, named Meta-Transformer, that leverages a frozen encoder to perform multimodal perception without any paired multimodal training data. In Meta-Transformer, the raw input data from various modalities are mapped into a shared token space, allowing a subsequent encoder with frozen parameters to extract high-level semantic features of the input data. Composed of three main components: a unified data tokenizer, a modality-shared encoder, and task-specific heads for downstream tasks, Meta-Transformer is the first framework to perform unified learning across 12 modalities with unpaired data. Experiments on different benchmarks reveal that Meta-Transformer can handle a wide range of tasks including fundamental perception (text, image, point cloud, audio, video), practical application (X-Ray, infrared, hyperspectral, and IMU), and data mining (graph, tabular, and time-series). Meta-Transformer indicates a promising future for developing unified multimodal intelligence with transformers. Code will be available at https://github.com/invictus717/MetaTransformer

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023 3

Towards Real-World Prohibited Item Detection: A Large-Scale X-ray Benchmark

Automatic security inspection using computer vision technology is a challenging task in real-world scenarios due to various factors, including intra-class variance, class imbalance, and occlusion. Most of the previous methods rarely solve the cases that the prohibited items are deliberately hidden in messy objects due to the lack of large-scale datasets, restricted their applications in real-world scenarios. Towards real-world prohibited item detection, we collect a large-scale dataset, named as PIDray, which covers various cases in real-world scenarios for prohibited item detection, especially for deliberately hidden items. With an intensive amount of effort, our dataset contains 12 categories of prohibited items in 47,677 X-ray images with high-quality annotated segmentation masks and bounding boxes. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest prohibited items detection dataset to date. Meanwhile, we design the selective dense attention network (SDANet) to construct a strong baseline, which consists of the dense attention module and the dependency refinement module. The dense attention module formed by the spatial and channel-wise dense attentions, is designed to learn the discriminative features to boost the performance. The dependency refinement module is used to exploit the dependencies of multi-scale features. Extensive experiments conducted on the collected PIDray dataset demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods, especially for detecting the deliberately hidden items.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 16, 2021

Lunguage: A Benchmark for Structured and Sequential Chest X-ray Interpretation

Radiology reports convey detailed clinical observations and capture diagnostic reasoning that evolves over time. However, existing evaluation methods are limited to single-report settings and rely on coarse metrics that fail to capture fine-grained clinical semantics and temporal dependencies. We introduce LUNGUAGE,a benchmark dataset for structured radiology report generation that supports both single-report evaluation and longitudinal patient-level assessment across multiple studies. It contains 1,473 annotated chest X-ray reports, each reviewed by experts, and 80 of them contain longitudinal annotations to capture disease progression and inter-study intervals, also reviewed by experts. Using this benchmark, we develop a two-stage framework that transforms generated reports into fine-grained, schema-aligned structured representations, enabling longitudinal interpretation. We also propose LUNGUAGESCORE, an interpretable metric that compares structured outputs at the entity, relation, and attribute level while modeling temporal consistency across patient timelines. These contributions establish the first benchmark dataset, structuring framework, and evaluation metric for sequential radiology reporting, with empirical results demonstrating that LUNGUAGESCORE effectively supports structured report evaluation. The code is available at: https://github.com/SuperSupermoon/Lunguage

  • 13 authors
·
May 27 2

ReXVQA: A Large-scale Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Generalist Chest X-ray Understanding

We present ReXVQA, the largest and most comprehensive benchmark for visual question answering (VQA) in chest radiology, comprising approximately 696,000 questions paired with 160,000 chest X-rays studies across training, validation, and test sets. Unlike prior efforts that rely heavily on template based queries, ReXVQA introduces a diverse and clinically authentic task suite reflecting five core radiological reasoning skills: presence assessment, location analysis, negation detection, differential diagnosis, and geometric reasoning. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art multimodal large language models, including MedGemma-4B-it, Qwen2.5-VL, Janus-Pro-7B, and Eagle2-9B. The best-performing model (MedGemma) achieves 83.24% overall accuracy. To bridge the gap between AI performance and clinical expertise, we conducted a comprehensive human reader study involving 3 radiology residents on 200 randomly sampled cases. Our evaluation demonstrates that MedGemma achieved superior performance (83.84% accuracy) compared to human readers (best radiology resident: 77.27%), representing a significant milestone where AI performance exceeds expert human evaluation on chest X-ray interpretation. The reader study reveals distinct performance patterns between AI models and human experts, with strong inter-reader agreement among radiologists while showing more variable agreement patterns between human readers and AI models. ReXVQA establishes a new standard for evaluating generalist radiological AI systems, offering public leaderboards, fine-grained evaluation splits, structured explanations, and category-level breakdowns. This benchmark lays the foundation for next-generation AI systems capable of mimicking expert-level clinical reasoning beyond narrow pathology classification. Our dataset will be open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/rajpurkarlab/ReXVQA

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 4

GEMeX: A Large-Scale, Groundable, and Explainable Medical VQA Benchmark for Chest X-ray Diagnosis

Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA) combines computer vision and natural language processing to automatically answer clinical inquiries about medical images. However, current Med-VQA datasets exhibit two significant limitations: (1) they often lack visual and textual explanations for answers, hindering comprehension for patients and junior doctors; (2) they typically offer a narrow range of question formats, inadequately reflecting the diverse requirements in practical scenarios. These limitations pose significant challenges to the development of a reliable and user-friendly Med-VQA system. To address these challenges, we introduce a large-scale, Groundable, and Explainable Medical VQA benchmark for chest X-ray diagnosis (GEMeX), featuring several innovative components: (1) a multi-modal explainability mechanism that offers detailed visual and textual explanations for each question-answer pair, thereby enhancing answer comprehensibility; (2) four question types, open-ended, closed-ended, single-choice, and multiple-choice, to better reflect practical needs. With 151,025 images and 1,605,575 questions, GEMeX is the currently largest chest X-ray VQA dataset. Evaluation of 12 representative large vision language models (LVLMs) on GEMeX reveals suboptimal performance, underscoring the dataset's complexity. Meanwhile, we propose a strong model by fine-tuning an existing LVLM on the GEMeX training set. The substantial performance improvement showcases the dataset's effectiveness. The benchmark is available at https://www.med-vqa.com/GEMeX.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024

Preference Fine-Tuning for Factuality in Chest X-Ray Interpretation Models Without Human Feedback

Radiologists play a crucial role by translating medical images into medical reports. However, the field faces staffing shortages and increasing workloads. While automated approaches using vision-language models (VLMs) show promise as assistants, they require exceptionally high accuracy. Most current VLMs in radiology rely solely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Meanwhile, in the general domain, additional preference fine-tuning has become standard practice. The challenge in radiology lies in the prohibitive cost of obtaining radiologist feedback. We propose a scalable automated preference alignment technique for VLMs in radiology, focusing on chest X-ray (CXR) report generation. Our method leverages publicly available datasets with an LLM-as-a-Judge mechanism, eliminating the need for additional expert radiologist feedback. We evaluate and benchmark five direct alignment algorithms (DAAs). Our results show up to a 57.4% improvement in average GREEN scores, a LLM-based metric for evaluating CXR reports, and a 9.2% increase in an average across six metrics (domain specific and general), compared to the SFT baseline. We study reward overoptimization via length exploitation, with reports lengthening by up to 3.2x. To assess a potential alignment tax, we benchmark on six additional diverse tasks, finding no significant degradations. A reader study involving four board-certified radiologists indicates win rates of up to 0.62 over the SFT baseline, while significantly penalizing verbosity. Our analysis provides actionable insights for the development of VLMs in high-stakes fields like radiology.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024

CheXagent: Towards a Foundation Model for Chest X-Ray Interpretation

Chest X-rays (CXRs) are the most frequently performed imaging test in clinical practice. Recent advances in the development of vision-language foundation models (FMs) give rise to the possibility of performing automated CXR interpretation, which can assist physicians with clinical decision-making and improve patient outcomes. However, developing FMs that can accurately interpret CXRs is challenging due to the (1) limited availability of large-scale vision-language datasets in the medical image domain, (2) lack of vision and language encoders that can capture the complexities of medical data, and (3) absence of evaluation frameworks for benchmarking the abilities of FMs on CXR interpretation. In this work, we address these challenges by first introducing CheXinstruct - a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset curated from 28 publicly-available datasets. We then present CheXagent - an instruction-tuned FM capable of analyzing and summarizing CXRs. To build CheXagent, we design a clinical large language model (LLM) for parsing radiology reports, a vision encoder for representing CXR images, and a network to bridge the vision and language modalities. Finally, we introduce CheXbench - a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate FMs across 8 clinically-relevant CXR interpretation tasks. Extensive quantitative evaluations and qualitative reviews with five expert radiologists demonstrate that CheXagent outperforms previously-developed general- and medical-domain FMs on CheXbench tasks. Furthermore, in an effort to improve model transparency, we perform a fairness evaluation across factors of sex, race and age to highlight potential performance disparities. Our project is at https://stanford-aimi.github.io/chexagent.html.

  • 17 authors
·
Jan 22, 2024 2

BenchX: A Unified Benchmark Framework for Medical Vision-Language Pretraining on Chest X-Rays

Medical Vision-Language Pretraining (MedVLP) shows promise in learning generalizable and transferable visual representations from paired and unpaired medical images and reports. MedVLP can provide useful features to downstream tasks and facilitate adapting task-specific models to new setups using fewer examples. However, existing MedVLP methods often differ in terms of datasets, preprocessing, and finetuning implementations. This pose great challenges in evaluating how well a MedVLP method generalizes to various clinically-relevant tasks due to the lack of unified, standardized, and comprehensive benchmark. To fill this gap, we propose BenchX, a unified benchmark framework that enables head-to-head comparison and systematical analysis between MedVLP methods using public chest X-ray datasets. Specifically, BenchX is composed of three components: 1) Comprehensive datasets covering nine datasets and four medical tasks; 2) Benchmark suites to standardize data preprocessing, train-test splits, and parameter selection; 3) Unified finetuning protocols that accommodate heterogeneous MedVLP methods for consistent task adaptation in classification, segmentation, and report generation, respectively. Utilizing BenchX, we establish baselines for nine state-of-the-art MedVLP methods and found that the performance of some early MedVLP methods can be enhanced to surpass more recent ones, prompting a revisiting of the developments and conclusions from prior works in MedVLP. Our code are available at https://github.com/yangzhou12/BenchX.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024 2

MedShift: Implicit Conditional Transport for X-Ray Domain Adaptation

Synthetic medical data offers a scalable solution for training robust models, but significant domain gaps limit its generalizability to real-world clinical settings. This paper addresses the challenge of cross-domain translation between synthetic and real X-ray images of the head, focusing on bridging discrepancies in attenuation behavior, noise characteristics, and soft tissue representation. We propose MedShift, a unified class-conditional generative model based on Flow Matching and Schrodinger Bridges, which enables high-fidelity, unpaired image translation across multiple domains. Unlike prior approaches that require domain-specific training or rely on paired data, MedShift learns a shared domain-agnostic latent space and supports seamless translation between any pair of domains seen during training. We introduce X-DigiSkull, a new dataset comprising aligned synthetic and real skull X-rays under varying radiation doses, to benchmark domain translation models. Experimental results demonstrate that, despite its smaller model size compared to diffusion-based approaches, MedShift offers strong performance and remains flexible at inference time, as it can be tuned to prioritize either perceptual fidelity or structural consistency, making it a scalable and generalizable solution for domain adaptation in medical imaging. The code and dataset are available at https://caetas.github.io/medshift.html

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 29

DENTEX: An Abnormal Tooth Detection with Dental Enumeration and Diagnosis Benchmark for Panoramic X-rays

Panoramic X-rays are frequently used in dentistry for treatment planning, but their interpretation can be both time-consuming and prone to error. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to aid in the analysis of these X-rays, thereby improving the accuracy of dental diagnoses and treatment plans. Nevertheless, designing automated algorithms for this purpose poses significant challenges, mainly due to the scarcity of annotated data and variations in anatomical structure. To address these issues, the Dental Enumeration and Diagnosis on Panoramic X-rays Challenge (DENTEX) has been organized in association with the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in 2023. This challenge aims to promote the development of algorithms for multi-label detection of abnormal teeth, using three types of hierarchically annotated data: partially annotated quadrant data, partially annotated quadrant-enumeration data, and fully annotated quadrant-enumeration-diagnosis data, inclusive of four different diagnoses. In this paper, we present the results of evaluating participant algorithms on the fully annotated data, additionally investigating performance variation for quadrant, enumeration, and diagnosis labels in the detection of abnormal teeth. The provision of this annotated dataset, alongside the results of this challenge, may lay the groundwork for the creation of AI-powered tools that can offer more precise and efficient diagnosis and treatment planning in the field of dentistry. The evaluation code and datasets can be accessed at https://github.com/ibrahimethemhamamci/DENTEX

  • 13 authors
·
May 30, 2023

Deep reproductive feature generation framework for the diagnosis of COVID-19 and viral pneumonia using chest X-ray images

The rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 cases is critical for timely treatment and preventing the spread of the disease. In this study, a two-stage feature extraction framework using eight state-of-the-art pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and an autoencoder is proposed to determine the health conditions of patients (COVID-19, Normal, Viral Pneumonia) based on chest X-rays. The X-ray scans are divided into four equally sized sections and analyzed by deep pre-trained CNNs. Subsequently, an autoencoder with three hidden layers is trained to extract reproductive features from the concatenated ouput of CNNs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, three different classifiers, which are single-layer perceptron (SLP), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and support vector machine (SVM) are used. Furthermore, the deep CNN architectures are used to create benchmark models and trained on the same dataset for comparision. The proposed framework outperforms other frameworks wih pre-trained feature extractors in binary classification and shows competitive results in three-class classification. The proposed methodology is task-independent and suitable for addressing various problems. The results show that the discriminative features are a subset of the reproductive features, suggesting that extracting task-independent features is superior to the extraction only task-based features. The flexibility and task-independence of the reproductive features make the conceptive information approach more favorable. The proposed methodology is novel and shows promising results for analyzing medical image data.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 20, 2023

MatQnA: A Benchmark Dataset for Multi-modal Large Language Models in Materials Characterization and Analysis

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable breakthroughs in general domains such as programming and writing, and have demonstrated strong potential in various scientific research scenarios. However, the capabilities of AI models in the highly specialized field of materials characterization and analysis have not yet been systematically or sufficiently validated. To address this gap, we present MatQnA, the first multi-modal benchmark dataset specifically designed for material characterization techniques. MatQnA includes ten mainstream characterization methods, such as X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), etc. We employ a hybrid approach combining LLMs with human-in-the-loop validation to construct high-quality question-answer pairs, integrating both multiple-choice and subjective questions. Our preliminary evaluation results show that the most advanced multi-modal AI models (e.g., GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, and Doubao Vision Pro 32K) have already achieved nearly 90% accuracy on objective questions in materials data interpretation and analysis tasks, demonstrating strong potential for applications in materials characterization and analysis. The MatQnA dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/richardhzgg/matQnA.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 14

SpineBench: A Clinically Salient, Level-Aware Benchmark Powered by the SpineMed-450k Corpus

Spine disorders affect 619 million people globally and are a leading cause of disability, yet AI-assisted diagnosis remains limited by the lack of level-aware, multimodal datasets. Clinical decision-making for spine disorders requires sophisticated reasoning across X-ray, CT, and MRI at specific vertebral levels. However, progress has been constrained by the absence of traceable, clinically-grounded instruction data and standardized, spine-specific benchmarks. To address this, we introduce SpineMed, an ecosystem co-designed with practicing spine surgeons. It features SpineMed-450k, the first large-scale dataset explicitly designed for vertebral-level reasoning across imaging modalities with over 450,000 instruction instances, and SpineBench, a clinically-grounded evaluation framework. SpineMed-450k is curated from diverse sources, including textbooks, guidelines, open datasets, and ~1,000 de-identified hospital cases, using a clinician-in-the-loop pipeline with a two-stage LLM generation method (draft and revision) to ensure high-quality, traceable data for question-answering, multi-turn consultations, and report generation. SpineBench evaluates models on clinically salient axes, including level identification, pathology assessment, and surgical planning. Our comprehensive evaluation of several recently advanced large vision-language models (LVLMs) on SpineBench reveals systematic weaknesses in fine-grained, level-specific reasoning. In contrast, our model fine-tuned on SpineMed-450k demonstrates consistent and significant improvements across all tasks. Clinician assessments confirm the diagnostic clarity and practical utility of our model's outputs.

Dataset and Benchmark for Enhancing Critical Retained Foreign Object Detection

Critical retained foreign objects (RFOs), including surgical instruments like sponges and needles, pose serious patient safety risks and carry significant financial and legal implications for healthcare institutions. Detecting critical RFOs using artificial intelligence remains challenging due to their rarity and the limited availability of chest X-ray datasets that specifically feature critical RFOs cases. Existing datasets only contain non-critical RFOs, like necklace or zipper, further limiting their utility for developing clinically impactful detection algorithms. To address these limitations, we introduce "Hopkins RFOs Bench", the first and largest dataset of its kind, containing 144 chest X-ray images of critical RFO cases collected over 18 years from the Johns Hopkins Health System. Using this dataset, we benchmark several state-of-the-art object detection models, highlighting the need for enhanced detection methodologies for critical RFO cases. Recognizing data scarcity challenges, we further explore image synthetic methods to bridge this gap. We evaluate two advanced synthetic image methods, DeepDRR-RFO, a physics-based method, and RoentGen-RFO, a diffusion-based method, for creating realistic radiographs featuring critical RFOs. Our comprehensive analysis identifies the strengths and limitations of each synthetic method, providing insights into effectively utilizing synthetic data to enhance model training. The Hopkins RFOs Bench and our findings significantly advance the development of reliable, generalizable AI-driven solutions for detecting critical RFOs in clinical chest X-rays.

  • 16 authors
·
Jul 9

TuneVLSeg: Prompt Tuning Benchmark for Vision-Language Segmentation Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown impressive performance in vision tasks, but adapting them to new domains often requires expensive fine-tuning. Prompt tuning techniques, including textual, visual, and multimodal prompting, offer efficient alternatives by leveraging learnable prompts. However, their application to Vision-Language Segmentation Models (VLSMs) and evaluation under significant domain shifts remain unexplored. This work presents an open-source benchmarking framework, TuneVLSeg, to integrate various unimodal and multimodal prompt tuning techniques into VLSMs, making prompt tuning usable for downstream segmentation datasets with any number of classes. TuneVLSeg includes 6 prompt tuning strategies on various prompt depths used in 2 VLSMs totaling of 8 different combinations. We test various prompt tuning on 8 diverse medical datasets, including 3 radiology datasets (breast tumor, echocardiograph, chest X-ray pathologies) and 5 non-radiology datasets (polyp, ulcer, skin cancer), and two natural domain segmentation datasets. Our study found that textual prompt tuning struggles under significant domain shifts, from natural-domain images to medical data. Furthermore, visual prompt tuning, with fewer hyperparameters than multimodal prompt tuning, often achieves performance competitive to multimodal approaches, making it a valuable first attempt. Our work advances the understanding and applicability of different prompt-tuning techniques for robust domain-specific segmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/naamiinepal/tunevlseg.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024

SPARK: Multi-Vision Sensor Perception and Reasoning Benchmark for Large-scale Vision-Language Models

Large-scale Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced with text-aligned vision inputs. They have made remarkable progress in computer vision tasks by aligning text modality with vision inputs. There are also endeavors to incorporate multi-vision sensors beyond RGB, including thermal, depth, and medical X-ray images. However, we observe that current LVLMs view images taken from multi-vision sensors as if they were in the same RGB domain without considering the physical characteristics of multi-vision sensors. They fail to convey the fundamental multi-vision sensor information from the dataset and the corresponding contextual knowledge properly. Consequently, alignment between the information from the actual physical environment and the text is not achieved correctly, making it difficult to answer complex sensor-related questions that consider the physical environment. In this paper, we aim to establish a multi-vision Sensor Perception And Reasoning benchmarK called SPARK that can reduce the fundamental multi-vision sensor information gap between images and multi-vision sensors. We generated 6,248 vision-language test samples automatically to investigate multi-vision sensory perception and multi-vision sensory reasoning on physical sensor knowledge proficiency across different formats, covering different types of sensor-related questions. We utilized these samples to assess ten leading LVLMs. The results showed that most models displayed deficiencies in multi-vision sensory reasoning to varying extents. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/top-yun/SPARK

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 21, 2024 3

CXReasonBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Structured Diagnostic Reasoning in Chest X-rays

Recent progress in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has enabled promising applications in medical tasks, such as report generation and visual question answering. However, existing benchmarks focus mainly on the final diagnostic answer, offering limited insight into whether models engage in clinically meaningful reasoning. To address this, we present CheXStruct and CXReasonBench, a structured pipeline and benchmark built on the publicly available MIMIC-CXR-JPG dataset. CheXStruct automatically derives a sequence of intermediate reasoning steps directly from chest X-rays, such as segmenting anatomical regions, deriving anatomical landmarks and diagnostic measurements, computing diagnostic indices, and applying clinical thresholds. CXReasonBench leverages this pipeline to evaluate whether models can perform clinically valid reasoning steps and to what extent they can learn from structured guidance, enabling fine-grained and transparent assessment of diagnostic reasoning. The benchmark comprises 18,988 QA pairs across 12 diagnostic tasks and 1,200 cases, each paired with up to 4 visual inputs, and supports multi-path, multi-stage evaluation including visual grounding via anatomical region selection and diagnostic measurements. Even the strongest of 10 evaluated LVLMs struggle with structured reasoning and generalization, often failing to link abstract knowledge with anatomically grounded visual interpretation. The code is available at https://github.com/ttumyche/CXReasonBench

  • 6 authors
·
May 23 2

CheXGenBench: A Unified Benchmark For Fidelity, Privacy and Utility of Synthetic Chest Radiographs

We introduce CheXGenBench, a rigorous and multifaceted evaluation framework for synthetic chest radiograph generation that simultaneously assesses fidelity, privacy risks, and clinical utility across state-of-the-art text-to-image generative models. Despite rapid advancements in generative AI for real-world imagery, medical domain evaluations have been hindered by methodological inconsistencies, outdated architectural comparisons, and disconnected assessment criteria that rarely address the practical clinical value of synthetic samples. CheXGenBench overcomes these limitations through standardised data partitioning and a unified evaluation protocol comprising over 20 quantitative metrics that systematically analyse generation quality, potential privacy vulnerabilities, and downstream clinical applicability across 11 leading text-to-image architectures. Our results reveal critical inefficiencies in the existing evaluation protocols, particularly in assessing generative fidelity, leading to inconsistent and uninformative comparisons. Our framework establishes a standardised benchmark for the medical AI community, enabling objective and reproducible comparisons while facilitating seamless integration of both existing and future generative models. Additionally, we release a high-quality, synthetic dataset, SynthCheX-75K, comprising 75K radiographs generated by the top-performing model (Sana 0.6B) in our benchmark to support further research in this critical domain. Through CheXGenBench, we establish a new state-of-the-art and release our framework, models, and SynthCheX-75K dataset at https://raman1121.github.io/CheXGenBench/

  • 6 authors
·
May 15 2

Illicit object detection in X-ray imaging using deep learning techniques: A comparative evaluation

Automated X-ray inspection is crucial for efficient and unobtrusive security screening in various public settings. However, challenges such as object occlusion, variations in the physical properties of items, diversity in X-ray scanning devices, and limited training data hinder accurate and reliable detection of illicit items. Despite the large body of research in the field, reported experimental evaluations are often incomplete, with frequently conflicting outcomes. To shed light on the research landscape and facilitate further research, a systematic, detailed, and thorough comparative evaluation of recent Deep Learning (DL)-based methods for X-ray object detection is conducted. For this, a comprehensive evaluation framework is developed, composed of: a) Six recent, large-scale, and widely used public datasets for X-ray illicit item detection (OPIXray, CLCXray, SIXray, EDS, HiXray, and PIDray), b) Ten different state-of-the-art object detection schemes covering all main categories in the literature, including generic Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), custom CNN, generic transformer, and hybrid CNN-transformer architectures, and c) Various detection (mAP50 and mAP50:95) and time/computational-complexity (inference time (ms), parameter size (M), and computational load (GFLOPS)) metrics. A thorough analysis of the results leads to critical observations and insights, emphasizing key aspects such as: a) Overall behavior of the object detection schemes, b) Object-level detection performance, c) Dataset-specific observations, and d) Time efficiency and computational complexity analysis. To support reproducibility of the reported experimental results, the evaluation code and model weights are made publicly available at https://github.com/jgenc/xray-comparative-evaluation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 23

Vision-Language Generative Model for View-Specific Chest X-ray Generation

Synthetic medical data generation has opened up new possibilities in the healthcare domain, offering a powerful tool for simulating clinical scenarios, enhancing diagnostic and treatment quality, gaining granular medical knowledge, and accelerating the development of unbiased algorithms. In this context, we present a novel approach called ViewXGen, designed to overcome the limitations of existing methods that rely on general domain pipelines using only radiology reports to generate frontal-view chest X-rays. Our approach takes into consideration the diverse view positions found in the dataset, enabling the generation of chest X-rays with specific views, which marks a significant advancement in the field. To achieve this, we introduce a set of specially designed tokens for each view position, tailoring the generation process to the user's preferences. Furthermore, we leverage multi-view chest X-rays as input, incorporating valuable information from different views within the same study. This integration rectifies potential errors and contributes to faithfully capturing abnormal findings in chest X-ray generation. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted statistical analyses, evaluating its performance in a clinical efficacy metric on the MIMIC-CXR dataset. Also, human evaluation demonstrates the remarkable capabilities of ViewXGen, particularly in producing realistic view-specific X-rays that closely resemble the original images.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 23, 2023

CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison

Large, labeled datasets have driven deep learning methods to achieve expert-level performance on a variety of medical imaging tasks. We present CheXpert, a large dataset that contains 224,316 chest radiographs of 65,240 patients. We design a labeler to automatically detect the presence of 14 observations in radiology reports, capturing uncertainties inherent in radiograph interpretation. We investigate different approaches to using the uncertainty labels for training convolutional neural networks that output the probability of these observations given the available frontal and lateral radiographs. On a validation set of 200 chest radiographic studies which were manually annotated by 3 board-certified radiologists, we find that different uncertainty approaches are useful for different pathologies. We then evaluate our best model on a test set composed of 500 chest radiographic studies annotated by a consensus of 5 board-certified radiologists, and compare the performance of our model to that of 3 additional radiologists in the detection of 5 selected pathologies. On Cardiomegaly, Edema, and Pleural Effusion, the model ROC and PR curves lie above all 3 radiologist operating points. We release the dataset to the public as a standard benchmark to evaluate performance of chest radiograph interpretation models. The dataset is freely available at https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/competitions/chexpert .

  • 20 authors
·
Jan 21, 2019

JARVIS-Leaderboard: A Large Scale Benchmark of Materials Design Methods

Lack of rigorous reproducibility and validation are major hurdles for scientific development across many fields. Materials science in particular encompasses a variety of experimental and theoretical approaches that require careful benchmarking. Leaderboard efforts have been developed previously to mitigate these issues. However, a comprehensive comparison and benchmarking on an integrated platform with multiple data modalities with both perfect and defect materials data is still lacking. This work introduces JARVIS-Leaderboard, an open-source and community-driven platform that facilitates benchmarking and enhances reproducibility. The platform allows users to set up benchmarks with custom tasks and enables contributions in the form of dataset, code, and meta-data submissions. We cover the following materials design categories: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Electronic Structure (ES), Force-fields (FF), Quantum Computation (QC) and Experiments (EXP). For AI, we cover several types of input data, including atomic structures, atomistic images, spectra, and text. For ES, we consider multiple ES approaches, software packages, pseudopotentials, materials, and properties, comparing results to experiment. For FF, we compare multiple approaches for material property predictions. For QC, we benchmark Hamiltonian simulations using various quantum algorithms and circuits. Finally, for experiments, we use the inter-laboratory approach to establish benchmarks. There are 1281 contributions to 274 benchmarks using 152 methods with more than 8 million data-points, and the leaderboard is continuously expanding. The JARVIS-Leaderboard is available at the website: https://pages.nist.gov/jarvis_leaderboard

  • 38 authors
·
Jun 20, 2023

Shadow and Light: Digitally Reconstructed Radiographs for Disease Classification

In this paper, we introduce DRR-RATE, a large-scale synthetic chest X-ray dataset derived from the recently released CT-RATE dataset. DRR-RATE comprises of 50,188 frontal Digitally Reconstructed Radiographs (DRRs) from 21,304 unique patients. Each image is paired with a corresponding radiology text report and binary labels for 18 pathology classes. Given the controllable nature of DRR generation, it facilitates the inclusion of lateral view images and images from any desired viewing position. This opens up avenues for research into new and novel multimodal applications involving paired CT, X-ray images from various views, text, and binary labels. We demonstrate the applicability of DRR-RATE alongside existing large-scale chest X-ray resources, notably the CheXpert dataset and CheXnet model. Experiments demonstrate that CheXnet, when trained and tested on the DRR-RATE dataset, achieves sufficient to high AUC scores for the six common pathologies cited in common literature: Atelectasis, Cardiomegaly, Consolidation, Lung Lesion, Lung Opacity, and Pleural Effusion. Additionally, CheXnet trained on the CheXpert dataset can accurately identify several pathologies, even when operating out of distribution. This confirms that the generated DRR images effectively capture the essential pathology features from CT images. The dataset and labels are publicly accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/farrell236/DRR-RATE.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 5, 2024

BS-Diff: Effective Bone Suppression Using Conditional Diffusion Models from Chest X-Ray Images

Chest X-rays (CXRs) are commonly utilized as a low-dose modality for lung screening. Nonetheless, the efficacy of CXRs is somewhat impeded, given that approximately 75% of the lung area overlaps with bone, which in turn hampers the detection and diagnosis of diseases. As a remedial measure, bone suppression techniques have been introduced. The current dual-energy subtraction imaging technique in the clinic requires costly equipment and subjects being exposed to high radiation. To circumvent these issues, deep learning-based image generation algorithms have been proposed. However, existing methods fall short in terms of producing high-quality images and capturing texture details, particularly with pulmonary vessels. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new bone suppression framework, termed BS-Diff, that comprises a conditional diffusion model equipped with a U-Net architecture and a simple enhancement module to incorporate an autoencoder. Our proposed network cannot only generate soft tissue images with a high bone suppression rate but also possesses the capability to capture fine image details. Additionally, we compiled the largest dataset since 2010, including data from 120 patients with high-definition, high-resolution paired CXRs and soft tissue images collected by our affiliated hospital. Extensive experiments, comparative analyses, ablation studies, and clinical evaluations indicate that the proposed BS-Diff outperforms several bone-suppression models across multiple metrics. Our code can be accessed at https://github.com/Benny0323/BS-Diff.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 26, 2023

RadGraph: Extracting Clinical Entities and Relations from Radiology Reports

Extracting structured clinical information from free-text radiology reports can enable the use of radiology report information for a variety of critical healthcare applications. In our work, we present RadGraph, a dataset of entities and relations in full-text chest X-ray radiology reports based on a novel information extraction schema we designed to structure radiology reports. We release a development dataset, which contains board-certified radiologist annotations for 500 radiology reports from the MIMIC-CXR dataset (14,579 entities and 10,889 relations), and a test dataset, which contains two independent sets of board-certified radiologist annotations for 100 radiology reports split equally across the MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert datasets. Using these datasets, we train and test a deep learning model, RadGraph Benchmark, that achieves a micro F1 of 0.82 and 0.73 on relation extraction on the MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert test sets respectively. Additionally, we release an inference dataset, which contains annotations automatically generated by RadGraph Benchmark across 220,763 MIMIC-CXR reports (around 6 million entities and 4 million relations) and 500 CheXpert reports (13,783 entities and 9,908 relations) with mappings to associated chest radiographs. Our freely available dataset can facilitate a wide range of research in medical natural language processing, as well as computer vision and multi-modal learning when linked to chest radiographs.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 28, 2021

A Comprehensive Study of GPT-4V's Multimodal Capabilities in Medical Imaging

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4V's capabilities across diverse medical imaging tasks, including Radiology Report Generation, Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA), and Visual Grounding. While prior efforts have explored GPT-4V's performance in medical image analysis, to the best of our knowledge, our study represents the first quantitative evaluation on publicly available benchmarks. Our findings highlight GPT-4V's potential in generating descriptive reports for chest X-ray images, particularly when guided by well-structured prompts. Meanwhile, its performance on the MIMIC-CXR dataset benchmark reveals areas for improvement in certain evaluation metrics, such as CIDEr. In the domain of Medical VQA, GPT-4V demonstrates proficiency in distinguishing between question types but falls short of the VQA-RAD benchmark in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, our analysis finds the limitations of conventional evaluation metrics like the BLEU scores, advocating for the development of more semantically robust assessment methods. In the field of Visual Grounding, GPT-4V exhibits preliminary promise in recognizing bounding boxes, but its precision is lacking, especially in identifying specific medical organs and signs. Our evaluation underscores the significant potential of GPT-4V in the medical imaging domain, while also emphasizing the need for targeted refinements to fully unlock its capabilities.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 31, 2023

MOSAIC: A Multilingual, Taxonomy-Agnostic, and Computationally Efficient Approach for Radiological Report Classification

Radiology reports contain rich clinical information that can be used to train imaging models without relying on costly manual annotation. However, existing approaches face critical limitations: rule-based methods struggle with linguistic variability, supervised models require large annotated datasets, and recent LLM-based systems depend on closed-source or resource-intensive models that are unsuitable for clinical use. Moreover, current solutions are largely restricted to English and single-modality, single-taxonomy datasets. We introduce MOSAIC, a multilingual, taxonomy-agnostic, and computationally efficient approach for radiological report classification. Built on a compact open-access language model (MedGemma-4B), MOSAIC supports both zero-/few-shot prompting and lightweight fine-tuning, enabling deployment on consumer-grade GPUs. We evaluate MOSAIC across seven datasets in English, Spanish, French, and Danish, spanning multiple imaging modalities and label taxonomies. The model achieves a mean macro F1 score of 88 across five chest X-ray datasets, approaching or exceeding expert-level performance, while requiring only 24 GB of GPU memory. With data augmentation, as few as 80 annotated samples are sufficient to reach a weighted F1 score of 82 on Danish reports, compared to 86 with the full 1600-sample training set. MOSAIC offers a practical alternative to large or proprietary LLMs in clinical settings. Code and models are open-source. We invite the community to evaluate and extend MOSAIC on new languages, taxonomies, and modalities.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 29

ICON: Improving Inter-Report Consistency of Radiology Report Generation via Lesion-aware Mix-up Augmentation

Previous research on radiology report generation has made significant progress in terms of increasing the clinical accuracy of generated reports. In this paper, we emphasize another crucial quality that it should possess, i.e., inter-report consistency, which refers to the capability of generating consistent reports for semantically equivalent radiographs. This quality is even of greater significance than the overall report accuracy in terms of ensuring the system's credibility, as a system prone to providing conflicting results would severely erode users' trust. Regrettably, existing approaches struggle to maintain inter-report consistency, exhibiting biases towards common patterns and susceptibility to lesion variants. To address this issue, we propose ICON, which improves the inter-report consistency of radiology report generation. Aiming at enhancing the system's ability to capture the similarities in semantically equivalent lesions, our approach involves first extracting lesions from input images and examining their characteristics. Then, we introduce a lesion-aware mix-up augmentation technique to ensure that the representations of the semantically equivalent lesions align with the same attributes, by linearly interpolating them during the training phase. Extensive experiments on three publicly available chest X-ray datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach, both in terms of improving the consistency and accuracy of the generated reports.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 20, 2024

MedQ-Bench: Evaluating and Exploring Medical Image Quality Assessment Abilities in MLLMs

Medical Image Quality Assessment (IQA) serves as the first-mile safety gate for clinical AI, yet existing approaches remain constrained by scalar, score-based metrics and fail to reflect the descriptive, human-like reasoning process central to expert evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce MedQ-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that establishes a perception-reasoning paradigm for language-based evaluation of medical image quality with Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). MedQ-Bench defines two complementary tasks: (1) MedQ-Perception, which probes low-level perceptual capability via human-curated questions on fundamental visual attributes; and (2) MedQ-Reasoning, encompassing both no-reference and comparison reasoning tasks, aligning model evaluation with human-like reasoning on image quality. The benchmark spans five imaging modalities and over forty quality attributes, totaling 2,600 perceptual queries and 708 reasoning assessments, covering diverse image sources including authentic clinical acquisitions, images with simulated degradations via physics-based reconstructions, and AI-generated images. To evaluate reasoning ability, we propose a multi-dimensional judging protocol that assesses model outputs along four complementary axes. We further conduct rigorous human-AI alignment validation by comparing LLM-based judgement with radiologists. Our evaluation of 14 state-of-the-art MLLMs demonstrates that models exhibit preliminary but unstable perceptual and reasoning skills, with insufficient accuracy for reliable clinical use. These findings highlight the need for targeted optimization of MLLMs in medical IQA. We hope that MedQ-Bench will catalyze further exploration and unlock the untapped potential of MLLMs for medical image quality evaluation.

What are the best systems? New perspectives on NLP Benchmarking

In Machine Learning, a benchmark refers to an ensemble of datasets associated with one or multiple metrics together with a way to aggregate different systems performances. They are instrumental in (i) assessing the progress of new methods along different axes and (ii) selecting the best systems for practical use. This is particularly the case for NLP with the development of large pre-trained models (e.g. GPT, BERT) that are expected to generalize well on a variety of tasks. While the community mainly focused on developing new datasets and metrics, there has been little interest in the aggregation procedure, which is often reduced to a simple average over various performance measures. However, this procedure can be problematic when the metrics are on a different scale, which may lead to spurious conclusions. This paper proposes a new procedure to rank systems based on their performance across different tasks. Motivated by the social choice theory, the final system ordering is obtained through aggregating the rankings induced by each task and is theoretically grounded. We conduct extensive numerical experiments (on over 270k scores) to assess the soundness of our approach both on synthetic and real scores (e.g. GLUE, EXTREM, SEVAL, TAC, FLICKR). In particular, we show that our method yields different conclusions on state-of-the-art systems than the mean-aggregation procedure while being both more reliable and robust.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 8, 2022

CXR-LLaVA: Multimodal Large Language Model for Interpreting Chest X-ray Images

Purpose: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their capabilities in a multimodal fashion, potentially replicating the image interpretation of human radiologists. This study aimed to develop open-source multimodal large language model for interpreting chest X-ray images (CXR-LLaVA). We also examined the effect of prompt engineering and model parameters such as temperature and nucleus sampling. Materials and Methods: For training, we collected 659,287 publicly available CXRs: 417,336 CXRs had labels for certain radiographic abnormalities (dataset 1); 241,951 CXRs provided free-text radiology reports (dataset 2). After pre-training the Resnet50 as an image encoder, the contrastive language-image pre-training was used to align CXRs and corresponding radiographic abnormalities. Then, the Large Language Model Meta AI-2 was fine-tuned using dataset 2, which were refined using GPT-4, with generating various question answering scenarios. The code can be found at https://github.com/ECOFRI/CXR_LLaVA. Results: In the test set, we observed that the model's performance fluctuated based on its parameters. On average, it achieved F1 score of 0.34 for five pathologic findings (atelectasis, cardiomegaly, consolidation, edema, and pleural effusion), which was improved to 0.46 through prompt engineering. In the independent set, the model achieved an average F1 score of 0.30 for the same pathologic findings. Notably, for the pediatric chest radiograph dataset, which was unseen during training, the model differentiated abnormal radiographs with an F1 score ranging from 0.84 to 0.85. Conclusion: CXR-LLaVA demonstrates promising potential in CXR interpretation. Both prompt engineering and model parameter adjustments can play pivotal roles in interpreting CXRs.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

PhyX: Does Your Model Have the "Wits" for Physical Reasoning?

Existing benchmarks fail to capture a crucial aspect of intelligence: physical reasoning, the integrated ability to combine domain knowledge, symbolic reasoning, and understanding of real-world constraints. To address this gap, we introduce PhyX: the first large-scale benchmark designed to assess models capacity for physics-grounded reasoning in visual scenarios. PhyX includes 3K meticulously curated multimodal questions spanning 6 reasoning types across 25 sub-domains and 6 core physics domains: thermodynamics, electromagnetism, mechanics, modern physics, optics, and wave\&acoustics. In our comprehensive evaluation, even state-of-the-art models struggle significantly with physical reasoning. GPT-4o, Claude3.7-Sonnet, and GPT-o4-mini achieve only 32.5\%, 42.2\%, and 45.8\% accuracy respectively-performance gaps exceeding 29\% compared to human experts. Our analysis exposes critical limitations in current models: over-reliance on memorized disciplinary knowledge, excessive dependence on mathematical formulations, and surface-level visual pattern matching rather than genuine physical understanding. We provide in-depth analysis through fine-grained statistics, detailed case studies, and multiple evaluation paradigms to thoroughly examine physical reasoning capabilities. To ensure reproducibility, we implement a compatible evaluation protocol based on widely-used toolkits such as VLMEvalKit, enabling one-click evaluation.

  • 19 authors
·
May 21 4

VER-Bench: Evaluating MLLMs on Reasoning with Fine-Grained Visual Evidence

With the rapid development of MLLMs, evaluating their visual capabilities has become increasingly crucial. Current benchmarks primarily fall into two main types: basic perception benchmarks, which focus on local details but lack deep reasoning (e.g., "what is in the image?"), and mainstream reasoning benchmarks, which concentrate on prominent image elements but may fail to assess subtle clues requiring intricate analysis. However, profound visual understanding and complex reasoning depend more on interpreting subtle, inconspicuous local details than on perceiving salient, macro-level objects. These details, though occupying minimal image area, often contain richer, more critical information for robust analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce the VER-Bench, a novel framework to evaluate MLLMs' ability to: 1) identify fine-grained visual clues, often occupying on average just 0.25% of the image area; 2) integrate these clues with world knowledge for complex reasoning. Comprising 374 carefully designed questions across Geospatial, Temporal, Situational, Intent, System State, and Symbolic reasoning, each question in VER-Bench is accompanied by structured evidence: visual clues and question-related reasoning derived from them. VER-Bench reveals current models' limitations in extracting subtle visual evidence and constructing evidence-based arguments, highlighting the need to enhance models's capabilities in fine-grained visual evidence extraction, integration, and reasoning for genuine visual understanding and human-like analysis. Dataset and additional materials are available https://github.com/verbta/ACMMM-25-Materials.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 6

Fairness and Robustness of CLIP-Based Models for Chest X-rays

Motivated by the strong performance of CLIP-based models in natural image-text domains, recent efforts have adapted these architectures to medical tasks, particularly in radiology, where large paired datasets of images and reports, such as chest X-rays, are available. While these models have shown encouraging results in terms of accuracy and discriminative performance, their fairness and robustness in the different clinical tasks remain largely underexplored. In this study, we extensively evaluate six widely used CLIP-based models on chest X-ray classification using three publicly available datasets: MIMIC-CXR, NIH-CXR14, and NEATX. We assess the models fairness across six conditions and patient subgroups based on age, sex, and race. Additionally, we assess the robustness to shortcut learning by evaluating performance on pneumothorax cases with and without chest drains. Our results indicate performance gaps between patients of different ages, but more equitable results for the other attributes. Moreover, all models exhibit lower performance on images without chest drains, suggesting reliance on spurious correlations. We further complement the performance analysis with a study of the embeddings generated by the models. While the sensitive attributes could be classified from the embeddings, we do not see such patterns using PCA, showing the limitations of these visualisation techniques when assessing models. Our code is available at https://github.com/TheoSourget/clip_cxr_fairness

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 28

SynthRAD2025 Grand Challenge dataset: generating synthetic CTs for radiotherapy

Medical imaging is essential in modern radiotherapy, supporting diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring. Synthetic imaging, particularly synthetic computed tomography (sCT), is gaining traction in radiotherapy. The SynthRAD2025 dataset and Grand Challenge promote advancements in sCT generation by providing a benchmarking platform for algorithms using cone-beam CT (CBCT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The dataset includes 2362 cases: 890 MRI-CT and 1472 CBCT-CT pairs from head-and-neck, thoracic, and abdominal cancer patients treated at five European university medical centers (UMC Groningen, UMC Utrecht, Radboud UMC, LMU University Hospital Munich, and University Hospital of Cologne). Data were acquired with diverse scanners and protocols. Pre-processing, including rigid and deformable image registration, ensures high-quality, modality-aligned images. Extensive quality assurance validates image consistency and usability. All imaging data is provided in MetaImage (.mha) format, ensuring compatibility with medical image processing tools. Metadata, including acquisition parameters and registration details, is available in structured CSV files. To maintain dataset integrity, SynthRAD2025 is divided into training (65%), validation (10%), and test (25%) sets. The dataset is accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14918089 under the SynthRAD2025 collection. This dataset supports benchmarking and the development of synthetic imaging techniques for radiotherapy applications. Use cases include sCT generation for MRI-only and MR-guided photon/proton therapy, CBCT-based dose calculations, and adaptive radiotherapy workflows. By integrating diverse acquisition settings, SynthRAD2025 fosters robust, generalizable image synthesis algorithms, advancing personalized cancer care and adaptive radiotherapy.

  • 19 authors
·
Feb 24

Benchmarking Neural Network Training Algorithms

Training algorithms, broadly construed, are an essential part of every deep learning pipeline. Training algorithm improvements that speed up training across a wide variety of workloads (e.g., better update rules, tuning protocols, learning rate schedules, or data selection schemes) could save time, save computational resources, and lead to better, more accurate, models. Unfortunately, as a community, we are currently unable to reliably identify training algorithm improvements, or even determine the state-of-the-art training algorithm. In this work, using concrete experiments, we argue that real progress in speeding up training requires new benchmarks that resolve three basic challenges faced by empirical comparisons of training algorithms: (1) how to decide when training is complete and precisely measure training time, (2) how to handle the sensitivity of measurements to exact workload details, and (3) how to fairly compare algorithms that require hyperparameter tuning. In order to address these challenges, we introduce a new, competitive, time-to-result benchmark using multiple workloads running on fixed hardware, the AlgoPerf: Training Algorithms benchmark. Our benchmark includes a set of workload variants that make it possible to detect benchmark submissions that are more robust to workload changes than current widely-used methods. Finally, we evaluate baseline submissions constructed using various optimizers that represent current practice, as well as other optimizers that have recently received attention in the literature. These baseline results collectively demonstrate the feasibility of our benchmark, show that non-trivial gaps between methods exist, and set a provisional state-of-the-art for future benchmark submissions to try and surpass.

  • 25 authors
·
Jun 12, 2023 1

Chest ImaGenome Dataset for Clinical Reasoning

Despite the progress in automatic detection of radiologic findings from chest X-ray (CXR) images in recent years, a quantitative evaluation of the explainability of these models is hampered by the lack of locally labeled datasets for different findings. With the exception of a few expert-labeled small-scale datasets for specific findings, such as pneumonia and pneumothorax, most of the CXR deep learning models to date are trained on global "weak" labels extracted from text reports, or trained via a joint image and unstructured text learning strategy. Inspired by the Visual Genome effort in the computer vision community, we constructed the first Chest ImaGenome dataset with a scene graph data structure to describe 242,072 images. Local annotations are automatically produced using a joint rule-based natural language processing (NLP) and atlas-based bounding box detection pipeline. Through a radiologist constructed CXR ontology, the annotations for each CXR are connected as an anatomy-centered scene graph, useful for image-level reasoning and multimodal fusion applications. Overall, we provide: i) 1,256 combinations of relation annotations between 29 CXR anatomical locations (objects with bounding box coordinates) and their attributes, structured as a scene graph per image, ii) over 670,000 localized comparison relations (for improved, worsened, or no change) between the anatomical locations across sequential exams, as well as ii) a manually annotated gold standard scene graph dataset from 500 unique patients.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 31, 2021

Optimizing Breast Cancer Detection in Mammograms: A Comprehensive Study of Transfer Learning, Resolution Reduction, and Multi-View Classification

Mammography, an X-ray-based imaging technique, remains central to the early detection of breast cancer. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have enabled increasingly sophisticated computer-aided diagnostic methods, evolving from patch-based classifiers to whole-image approaches and then to multi-view architectures that jointly analyze complementary projections. Despite this progress, several critical questions remain unanswered. In this study, we systematically investigate these issues by addressing five key research questions: (1) the role of patch classifiers in performance, (2) the transferability of natural-image-trained backbones, (3) the advantages of learn-to-resize over conventional downscaling, (4) the contribution of multi-view integration, and (5) the robustness of findings across varying image quality. Beyond benchmarking, our experiments demonstrate clear performance gains over prior work. For the CBIS-DDSM dataset, we improved single-view AUC from 0.8153 to 0.8343, and multiple-view AUC from 0.8483 to 0.8658. Using a new comparative method, we also observed a 0.0217 AUC increase when extending from single to multiple-view analysis. On the complete VinDr-Mammo dataset, the multiple-view approach further improved results, achieving a 0.0492 AUC increase over single view and reaching 0.8511 AUC overall. These results establish new state-of-the-art benchmarks, providing clear evidence of the advantages of multi-view architectures for mammogram interpretation. Beyond performance, our analysis offers principled insights into model design and transfer learning strategies, contributing to the development of more accurate and reliable breast cancer screening tools. The inference code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/dpetrini/multiple-view.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 25

Revisiting pre-trained remote sensing model benchmarks: resizing and normalization matters

Research in self-supervised learning (SSL) with natural images has progressed rapidly in recent years and is now increasingly being applied to and benchmarked with datasets containing remotely sensed imagery. A common benchmark case is to evaluate SSL pre-trained model embeddings on datasets of remotely sensed imagery with small patch sizes, e.g., 32x32 pixels, whereas standard SSL pre-training takes place with larger patch sizes, e.g., 224x224. Furthermore, pre-training methods tend to use different image normalization preprocessing steps depending on the dataset. In this paper, we show, across seven satellite and aerial imagery datasets of varying resolution, that by simply following the preprocessing steps used in pre-training (precisely, image sizing and normalization methods), one can achieve significant performance improvements when evaluating the extracted features on downstream tasks -- an important detail overlooked in previous work in this space. We show that by following these steps, ImageNet pre-training remains a competitive baseline for satellite imagery based transfer learning tasks -- for example we find that these steps give +32.28 to overall accuracy on the So2Sat random split dataset and +11.16 on the EuroSAT dataset. Finally, we report comprehensive benchmark results with a variety of simple baseline methods for each of the seven datasets, forming an initial benchmark suite for remote sensing imagery.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2023

Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Machine Learning Techniques

Breast cancer is one of the most threatening diseases in women's life; thus, the early and accurate diagnosis plays a key role in reducing the risk of death in a patient's life. Mammography stands as the reference technique for breast cancer screening; nevertheless, many countries still lack access to mammograms due to economic, social, and cultural issues. Latest advances in computational tools, infrared cameras and devices for bio-impedance quantification, have given a chance to emerge other reference techniques like thermography, infrared thermography, electrical impedance tomography and biomarkers found in blood tests, therefore being faster, reliable and cheaper than other methods. In the last two decades, the techniques mentioned above have been considered as parallel and extended approaches for breast cancer diagnosis, as well many authors concluded that false positives and false negatives rates are significantly reduced. Moreover, when a screening method works together with a computational technique, it generates a "computer-aided diagnosis" system. The present work aims to review the last breakthroughs about the three techniques mentioned earlier, suggested machine learning techniques to breast cancer diagnosis, thus, describing the benefits of some methods in relation with other ones, such as, logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, deep and convolutional neural networks. With this, we studied several hyperparameters optimization approaches with parzen tree optimizers to improve the performance of baseline models. An exploratory data analysis for each database and a benchmark of convolutional neural networks for the database of thermal images are presented. The benchmark process, reviews image classification techniques with convolutional neural networks, like, Resnet50, NasNetmobile, InceptionResnet and Xception.

  • 1 authors
·
May 3, 2023

PhysUniBench: An Undergraduate-Level Physics Reasoning Benchmark for Multimodal Models

Physics problem-solving is a challenging domain for large AI models, requiring integration of conceptual understanding, mathematical reasoning, and interpretation of physical diagrams. Current evaluation methodologies show notable limitations in capturing the breadth and complexity of undergraduate-level physics, underscoring the need for more rigorous assessments. To this end, we present PhysUniBench, a large-scale multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate and improve the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) specifically on undergraduate-level physics problems. PhysUniBench consists of 3,304 physics questions spanning 8 major sub-disciplines of physics, each accompanied by one visual diagrams. The benchmark includes both open-ended and multiple-choice questions, systematically curated and difficulty-rated through an iterative model-in-the-loop process. The benchmark's construction involved a rigorous multi-stage process, including multiple roll-outs, expert-level evaluation, automated filtering of easily solved problems, and a nuanced difficulty grading system with five levels. Through extensive experiments, we observe that current state-of-the-art models encounter substantial challenges in physics reasoning. For example, GPT-4o mini achieves only about 34.2\% accuracy in the proposed PhysUniBench. These results highlight that current MLLMs struggle with advanced physics reasoning, especially on multi-step problems and those requiring precise diagram interpretation. By providing a broad and rigorous assessment tool, PhysUniBench aims to drive progress in AI for Science, encouraging the development of models with stronger physical reasoning, problem-solving skills, and multimodal understanding. The benchmark and evaluation scripts are available at https://prismax-team.github.io/PhysUniBenchmark/.

  • 16 authors
·
Jun 21

MedFrameQA: A Multi-Image Medical VQA Benchmark for Clinical Reasoning

Existing medical VQA benchmarks mostly focus on single-image analysis, yet clinicians almost always compare a series of images before reaching a diagnosis. To better approximate this workflow, we introduce MedFrameQA -- the first benchmark that explicitly evaluates multi-image reasoning in medical VQA. To build MedFrameQA both at scale and in high-quality, we develop 1) an automated pipeline that extracts temporally coherent frames from medical videos and constructs VQA items whose content evolves logically across images, and 2) a multiple-stage filtering strategy, including model-based and manual review, to preserve data clarity, difficulty, and medical relevance. The resulting dataset comprises 2,851 VQA pairs (gathered from 9,237 high-quality frames in 3,420 videos), covering nine human body systems and 43 organs; every question is accompanied by two to five images. We comprehensively benchmark ten advanced Multimodal LLMs -- both proprietary and open source, with and without explicit reasoning modules -- on MedFrameQA. The evaluation challengingly reveals that all models perform poorly, with most accuracies below 50%, and accuracy fluctuates as the number of images per question increases. Error analysis further shows that models frequently ignore salient findings, mis-aggregate evidence across images, and propagate early mistakes through their reasoning chains; results also vary substantially across body systems, organs, and modalities. We hope this work can catalyze research on clinically grounded, multi-image reasoning and accelerate progress toward more capable diagnostic AI systems.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22

MatTools: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Materials Science Tools

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to materials science questions, including literature comprehension, property prediction, materials discovery and alloy design. At the same time, a wide range of physics-based computational approaches have been developed in which materials properties can be calculated. Here, we propose a benchmark application to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs to answer materials science questions through the generation and safe execution of codes based on such physics-based computational materials science packages. MatTools is built on two complementary components: a materials simulation tool question-answer (QA) benchmark and a real-world tool-usage benchmark. We designed an automated methodology to efficiently collect real-world materials science tool-use examples. The QA benchmark, derived from the pymatgen (Python Materials Genomics) codebase and documentation, comprises 69,225 QA pairs that assess the ability of an LLM to understand materials science tools. The real-world benchmark contains 49 tasks (138 subtasks) requiring the generation of functional Python code for materials property calculations. Our evaluation of diverse LLMs yields three key insights: (1)Generalists outshine specialists;(2)AI knows AI; and (3)Simpler is better. MatTools provides a standardized framework for assessing and improving LLM capabilities for materials science tool applications, facilitating the development of more effective AI systems for materials science and general scientific research.

  • 6 authors
·
May 16 2

MedImageInsight: An Open-Source Embedding Model for General Domain Medical Imaging

In this work, we present MedImageInsight, an open-source medical imaging embedding model. MedImageInsight is trained on medical images with associated text and labels across a diverse collection of domains, including X-Ray, CT, MRI, dermoscopy, OCT, fundus photography, ultrasound, histopathology, and mammography. Rigorous evaluations demonstrate MedImageInsight's ability to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) or human expert level performance across classification, image-image search, and fine-tuning tasks. Specifically, on public datasets, MedImageInsight achieves SOTA in CT 3D medical image retrieval, as well as SOTA in disease classification and search for chest X-ray, dermatology, and OCT imaging. Furthermore, MedImageInsight achieves human expert performance in bone age estimation (on both public and partner data), as well as AUC above 0.9 in most other domains. When paired with a text decoder, MedImageInsight achieves near SOTA level single image report findings generation with less than 10\% the parameters of other models. Compared to fine-tuning GPT-4o with only MIMIC-CXR data for the same task, MedImageInsight outperforms in clinical metrics, but underperforms on lexical metrics where GPT-4o sets a new SOTA. Importantly for regulatory purposes, MedImageInsight can generate ROC curves, adjust sensitivity and specificity based on clinical need, and provide evidence-based decision support through image-image search (which can also enable retrieval augmented generation). In an independent clinical evaluation of image-image search in chest X-ray, MedImageInsight outperformed every other publicly available foundation model evaluated by large margins (over 6 points AUC), and significantly outperformed other models in terms of AI fairness (across age and gender). We hope releasing MedImageInsight will help enhance collective progress in medical imaging AI research and development.

  • 31 authors
·
Oct 9, 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

Exploring Multimodal Large Language Models for Radiology Report Error-checking

This paper proposes one of the first clinical applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs) as an assistant for radiologists to check errors in their reports. We created an evaluation dataset from two real-world radiology datasets (MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray), with 1,000 subsampled reports each. A subset of original reports was modified to contain synthetic errors by introducing various type of mistakes. The evaluation contained two difficulty levels: SIMPLE for binary error-checking and COMPLEX for identifying error types. LLaVA (Large Language and Visual Assistant) variant models, including our instruction-tuned model, were used for the evaluation. Additionally, a domain expert evaluation was conducted on a small test set. At the SIMPLE level, the LLaVA v1.5 model outperformed other publicly available models. Instruction tuning significantly enhanced performance by 47.4% and 25.4% on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray data, respectively. The model also surpassed the domain experts accuracy in the MIMIC-CXR dataset by 1.67%. Notably, among the subsets (N=21) of the test set where a clinician did not achieve the correct conclusion, the LLaVA ensemble mode correctly identified 71.4% of these cases. This study marks a promising step toward utilizing multi-modal LLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy in radiology. The ensemble model demonstrated comparable performance to clinicians, even capturing errors overlooked by humans. Nevertheless, future work is needed to improve the model ability to identify the types of inconsistency.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 20, 2023

Benchmarking emergency department triage prediction models with machine learning and large public electronic health records

The demand for emergency department (ED) services is increasing across the globe, particularly during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Clinical triage and risk assessment have become increasingly challenging due to the shortage of medical resources and the strain on hospital infrastructure caused by the pandemic. As a result of the widespread use of electronic health records (EHRs), we now have access to a vast amount of clinical data, which allows us to develop predictive models and decision support systems to address these challenges. To date, however, there are no widely accepted benchmark ED triage prediction models based on large-scale public EHR data. An open-source benchmarking platform would streamline research workflows by eliminating cumbersome data preprocessing, and facilitate comparisons among different studies and methodologies. In this paper, based on the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care IV Emergency Department (MIMIC-IV-ED) database, we developed a publicly available benchmark suite for ED triage predictive models and created a benchmark dataset that contains over 400,000 ED visits from 2011 to 2019. We introduced three ED-based outcomes (hospitalization, critical outcomes, and 72-hour ED reattendance) and implemented a variety of popular methodologies, ranging from machine learning methods to clinical scoring systems. We evaluated and compared the performance of these methods against benchmark tasks. Our codes are open-source, allowing anyone with MIMIC-IV-ED data access to perform the same steps in data processing, benchmark model building, and experiments. This study provides future researchers with insights, suggestions, and protocols for managing raw data and developing risk triaging tools for emergency care.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 22, 2021

Generating Synthetic Computed Tomography for Radiotherapy: SynthRAD2023 Challenge Report

Radiation therapy plays a crucial role in cancer treatment, necessitating precise delivery of radiation to tumors while sparing healthy tissues over multiple days. Computed tomography (CT) is integral for treatment planning, offering electron density data crucial for accurate dose calculations. However, accurately representing patient anatomy is challenging, especially in adaptive radiotherapy, where CT is not acquired daily. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides superior soft-tissue contrast. Still, it lacks electron density information while cone beam CT (CBCT) lacks direct electron density calibration and is mainly used for patient positioning. Adopting MRI-only or CBCT-based adaptive radiotherapy eliminates the need for CT planning but presents challenges. Synthetic CT (sCT) generation techniques aim to address these challenges by using image synthesis to bridge the gap between MRI, CBCT, and CT. The SynthRAD2023 challenge was organized to compare synthetic CT generation methods using multi-center ground truth data from 1080 patients, divided into two tasks: 1) MRI-to-CT and 2) CBCT-to-CT. The evaluation included image similarity and dose-based metrics from proton and photon plans. The challenge attracted significant participation, with 617 registrations and 22/17 valid submissions for tasks 1/2. Top-performing teams achieved high structural similarity indices (>0.87/0.90) and gamma pass rates for photon (>98.1%/99.0%) and proton (>99.0%/97.3%) plans. However, no significant correlation was found between image similarity metrics and dose accuracy, emphasizing the need for dose evaluation when assessing the clinical applicability of sCT. SynthRAD2023 facilitated the investigation and benchmarking of sCT generation techniques, providing insights for developing MRI-only and CBCT-based adaptive radiotherapy.

  • 59 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

JavaBench: A Benchmark of Object-Oriented Code Generation for Evaluating Large Language Models

Code generation benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate LLMs' capabilities. However, after consolidating the latest 24 benchmarks, we noticed three significant imbalances. First, imbalanced programming language. 95.8% of benchmarks involve Python, while only 5 benchmarks involve Java. Second, imbalanced code granularity. Function-/statement-level benchmarks account for over 83.3% of benchmarks. Only a mere handful extends to class-/project-levels, and all are limited to Python. Third, lacking advanced features. Existing benchmarks primarily assess basic coding skills, while overlooking advanced Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) features (i.e., encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism). To fill these gaps, we propose JavaBench, a project-level Java benchmark that exercises OOP features. It comprises four Java projects with 389 methods in 106 Java classes. The test coverage is up to 92%, and JavaBench is attested by 282 undergraduate students, reaching a 90.93/100 average score (i.e., pass rate against the test suite), ensuring the quality of documentation, code skeleton, and tests. To better evaluate LLM's capability against JavaBench, we introduce a systematic evaluation design covering three context settings and five synthesis strategies at two granularities using three hierarchical metrics. Our extensive experiment yields several interesting findings. First, we noticed that regarding project-level Java programming, LLMs are far behind undergraduate students (no project can be correctly completed by any studied LLMs, and at most 41.17% Pass@5 in a more relaxed evaluation). Second, using method signature as prompt context may strike an ideal balance for project-level code generation. JavaBench is publicly available at https://github.com/java-bench/JavaBench.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024

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

MedSG-Bench: A Benchmark for Medical Image Sequences Grounding

Visual grounding is essential for precise perception and reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially in medical imaging domains. While existing medical visual grounding benchmarks primarily focus on single-image scenarios, real-world clinical applications often involve sequential images, where accurate lesion localization across different modalities and temporal tracking of disease progression (e.g., pre- vs. post-treatment comparison) require fine-grained cross-image semantic alignment and context-aware reasoning. To remedy the underrepresentation of image sequences in existing medical visual grounding benchmarks, we propose MedSG-Bench, the first benchmark tailored for Medical Image Sequences Grounding. It comprises eight VQA-style tasks, formulated into two paradigms of the grounding tasks, including 1) Image Difference Grounding, which focuses on detecting change regions across images, and 2) Image Consistency Grounding, which emphasizes detection of consistent or shared semantics across sequential images. MedSG-Bench covers 76 public datasets, 10 medical imaging modalities, and a wide spectrum of anatomical structures and diseases, totaling 9,630 question-answer pairs. We benchmark both general-purpose MLLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL) and medical-domain specialized MLLMs (e.g., HuatuoGPT-vision), observing that even the advanced models exhibit substantial limitations in medical sequential grounding tasks. To advance this field, we construct MedSG-188K, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset tailored for sequential visual grounding, and further develop MedSeq-Grounder, an MLLM designed to facilitate future research on fine-grained understanding across medical sequential images. The benchmark, dataset, and model are available at https://huggingface.co/MedSG-Bench

  • 7 authors
·
May 17

DiscoveryBench: Towards Data-Driven Discovery with Large Language Models

Can the rapid advances in code generation, function calling, and data analysis using large language models (LLMs) help automate the search and verification of hypotheses purely from a set of provided datasets? To evaluate this question, we present DiscoveryBench, the first comprehensive benchmark that formalizes the multi-step process of data-driven discovery. The benchmark is designed to systematically assess current model capabilities in discovery tasks and provide a useful resource for improving them. Our benchmark contains 264 tasks collected across 6 diverse domains, such as sociology and engineering, by manually deriving discovery workflows from published papers to approximate the real-world challenges faced by researchers, where each task is defined by a dataset, its metadata, and a discovery goal in natural language. We additionally provide 903 synthetic tasks to conduct controlled evaluations across task complexity. Furthermore, our structured formalism of data-driven discovery enables a facet-based evaluation that provides useful insights into different failure modes. We evaluate several popular LLM-based reasoning frameworks using both open and closed LLMs as baselines on DiscoveryBench and find that even the best system scores only 25%. Our benchmark, thus, illustrates the challenges in autonomous data-driven discovery and serves as a valuable resource for the community to make progress.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 1, 2024

Xplainer: From X-Ray Observations to Explainable Zero-Shot Diagnosis

Automated diagnosis prediction from medical images is a valuable resource to support clinical decision-making. However, such systems usually need to be trained on large amounts of annotated data, which often is scarce in the medical domain. Zero-shot methods address this challenge by allowing a flexible adaption to new settings with different clinical findings without relying on labeled data. Further, to integrate automated diagnosis in the clinical workflow, methods should be transparent and explainable, increasing medical professionals' trust and facilitating correctness verification. In this work, we introduce Xplainer, a novel framework for explainable zero-shot diagnosis in the clinical setting. Xplainer adapts the classification-by-description approach of contrastive vision-language models to the multi-label medical diagnosis task. Specifically, instead of directly predicting a diagnosis, we prompt the model to classify the existence of descriptive observations, which a radiologist would look for on an X-Ray scan, and use the descriptor probabilities to estimate the likelihood of a diagnosis. Our model is explainable by design, as the final diagnosis prediction is directly based on the prediction of the underlying descriptors. We evaluate Xplainer on two chest X-ray datasets, CheXpert and ChestX-ray14, and demonstrate its effectiveness in improving the performance and explainability of zero-shot diagnosis. Our results suggest that Xplainer provides a more detailed understanding of the decision-making process and can be a valuable tool for clinical diagnosis.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 23, 2023

DiagnosisArena: Benchmarking Diagnostic Reasoning for Large Language Models

The emergence of groundbreaking large language models capable of performing complex reasoning tasks holds significant promise for addressing various scientific challenges, including those arising in complex clinical scenarios. To enable their safe and effective deployment in real-world healthcare settings, it is urgently necessary to benchmark the diagnostic capabilities of current models systematically. Given the limitations of existing medical benchmarks in evaluating advanced diagnostic reasoning, we present DiagnosisArena, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark designed to rigorously assess professional-level diagnostic competence. DiagnosisArena consists of 1,113 pairs of segmented patient cases and corresponding diagnoses, spanning 28 medical specialties, deriving from clinical case reports published in 10 top-tier medical journals. The benchmark is developed through a meticulous construction pipeline, involving multiple rounds of screening and review by both AI systems and human experts, with thorough checks conducted to prevent data leakage. Our study reveals that even the most advanced reasoning models, o3-mini, o1, and DeepSeek-R1, achieve only 45.82%, 31.09%, and 17.79% accuracy, respectively. This finding highlights a significant generalization bottleneck in current large language models when faced with clinical diagnostic reasoning challenges. Through DiagnosisArena, we aim to drive further advancements in AIs diagnostic reasoning capabilities, enabling more effective solutions for real-world clinical diagnostic challenges. We provide the benchmark and evaluation tools for further research and development https://github.com/SPIRAL-MED/DiagnosisArena.

  • 8 authors
·
May 20

U-Bench: A Comprehensive Understanding of U-Net through 100-Variant Benchmarking

Over the past decade, U-Net has been the dominant architecture in medical image segmentation, leading to the development of thousands of U-shaped variants. Despite its widespread adoption, there is still no comprehensive benchmark to systematically evaluate their performance and utility, largely because of insufficient statistical validation and limited consideration of efficiency and generalization across diverse datasets. To bridge this gap, we present U-Bench, the first large-scale, statistically rigorous benchmark that evaluates 100 U-Net variants across 28 datasets and 10 imaging modalities. Our contributions are threefold: (1) Comprehensive Evaluation: U-Bench evaluates models along three key dimensions: statistical robustness, zero-shot generalization, and computational efficiency. We introduce a novel metric, U-Score, which jointly captures the performance-efficiency trade-off, offering a deployment-oriented perspective on model progress. (2) Systematic Analysis and Model Selection Guidance: We summarize key findings from the large-scale evaluation and systematically analyze the impact of dataset characteristics and architectural paradigms on model performance. Based on these insights, we propose a model advisor agent to guide researchers in selecting the most suitable models for specific datasets and tasks. (3) Public Availability: We provide all code, models, protocols, and weights, enabling the community to reproduce our results and extend the benchmark with future methods. In summary, U-Bench not only exposes gaps in previous evaluations but also establishes a foundation for fair, reproducible, and practically relevant benchmarking in the next decade of U-Net-based segmentation models. The project can be accessed at: https://fenghetan9.github.io/ubench. Code is available at: https://github.com/FengheTan9/U-Bench.

CoMix: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Task Comic Understanding

The comic domain is rapidly advancing with the development of single-page analysis and synthesis models. However, evaluation metrics and datasets lag behind, often limited to small-scale or single-style test sets. We introduce a novel benchmark, CoMix, designed to evaluate the multi-task capabilities of models in comic analysis. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on isolated tasks such as object detection or text recognition, CoMix addresses a broader range of tasks including object detection, speaker identification, character re-identification, reading order, and multi-modal reasoning tasks like character naming and dialogue generation. Our benchmark comprises three existing datasets with expanded annotations to support multi-task evaluation. To mitigate the over-representation of manga-style data, we have incorporated a new dataset of carefully selected American comic-style books, thereby enriching the diversity of comic styles. CoMix is designed to assess pre-trained models in zero-shot and limited fine-tuning settings, probing their transfer capabilities across different comic styles and tasks. The validation split of the benchmark is publicly available for research purposes, and an evaluation server for the held-out test split is also provided. Comparative results between human performance and state-of-the-art models reveal a significant performance gap, highlighting substantial opportunities for advancements in comic understanding. The dataset, baseline models, and code are accessible at the repository link. This initiative sets a new standard for comprehensive comic analysis, providing the community with a common benchmark for evaluation on a large and varied set.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024

XLRS-Bench: Could Your Multimodal LLMs Understand Extremely Large Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery?

The astonishing breakthrough of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has necessitated new benchmarks to quantitatively assess their capabilities, reveal their limitations, and indicate future research directions. However, this is challenging in the context of remote sensing (RS), since the imagery features ultra-high resolution that incorporates extremely complex semantic relationships. Existing benchmarks usually adopt notably smaller image sizes than real-world RS scenarios, suffer from limited annotation quality, and consider insufficient dimensions of evaluation. To address these issues, we present XLRS-Bench: a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the perception and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in ultra-high-resolution RS scenarios. XLRS-Bench boasts the largest average image size (8500times8500) observed thus far, with all evaluation samples meticulously annotated manually, assisted by a novel semi-automatic captioner on ultra-high-resolution RS images. On top of the XLRS-Bench, 16 sub-tasks are defined to evaluate MLLMs' 10 kinds of perceptual capabilities and 6 kinds of reasoning capabilities, with a primary emphasis on advanced cognitive processes that facilitate real-world decision-making and the capture of spatiotemporal changes. The results of both general and RS-focused MLLMs on XLRS-Bench indicate that further efforts are needed for real-world RS applications. We have open-sourced XLRS-Bench to support further research in developing more powerful MLLMs for remote sensing.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 31

SKM-TEA: A Dataset for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction with Dense Image Labels for Quantitative Clinical Evaluation

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a cornerstone of modern medical imaging. However, long image acquisition times, the need for qualitative expert analysis, and the lack of (and difficulty extracting) quantitative indicators that are sensitive to tissue health have curtailed widespread clinical and research studies. While recent machine learning methods for MRI reconstruction and analysis have shown promise for reducing this burden, these techniques are primarily validated with imperfect image quality metrics, which are discordant with clinically-relevant measures that ultimately hamper clinical deployment and clinician trust. To mitigate this challenge, we present the Stanford Knee MRI with Multi-Task Evaluation (SKM-TEA) dataset, a collection of quantitative knee MRI (qMRI) scans that enables end-to-end, clinically-relevant evaluation of MRI reconstruction and analysis tools. This 1.6TB dataset consists of raw-data measurements of ~25,000 slices (155 patients) of anonymized patient MRI scans, the corresponding scanner-generated DICOM images, manual segmentations of four tissues, and bounding box annotations for sixteen clinically relevant pathologies. We provide a framework for using qMRI parameter maps, along with image reconstructions and dense image labels, for measuring the quality of qMRI biomarker estimates extracted from MRI reconstruction, segmentation, and detection techniques. Finally, we use this framework to benchmark state-of-the-art baselines on this dataset. We hope our SKM-TEA dataset and code can enable a broad spectrum of research for modular image reconstruction and image analysis in a clinically informed manner. Dataset access, code, and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/skm-tea.

  • 12 authors
·
Mar 13, 2022

ONEBench to Test Them All: Sample-Level Benchmarking Over Open-Ended Capabilities

Traditional fixed test sets fall short in evaluating open-ended capabilities of foundation models. To address this, we propose ONEBench(OpeN-Ended Benchmarking), a new testing paradigm that consolidates individual evaluation datasets into a unified, ever-expanding sample pool. ONEBench allows users to generate custom, open-ended evaluation benchmarks from this pool, corresponding to specific capabilities of interest. By aggregating samples across test sets, ONEBench enables the assessment of diverse capabilities beyond those covered by the original test sets, while mitigating overfitting and dataset bias. Most importantly, it frames model evaluation as a collective process of selecting and aggregating sample-level tests. The shift from task-specific benchmarks to ONEBench introduces two challenges: (1)heterogeneity and (2)incompleteness. Heterogeneity refers to the aggregation over diverse metrics, while incompleteness describes comparing models evaluated on different data subsets. To address these challenges, we explore algorithms to aggregate sparse measurements into reliable model scores. Our aggregation algorithm ensures identifiability(asymptotically recovering ground-truth scores) and rapid convergence, enabling accurate model ranking with less data. On homogenous datasets, we show our aggregation algorithm provides rankings that highly correlate with those produced by average scores. We also demonstrate robustness to ~95% of measurements missing, reducing evaluation cost by up to 20x with little-to-no change in model rankings. We introduce ONEBench-LLM for language models and ONEBench-LMM for vision-language models, unifying evaluations across these domains. Overall, we present a technique for open-ended evaluation, which can aggregate over incomplete, heterogeneous sample-level measurements to continually grow a benchmark alongside the rapidly developing foundation models.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024 2

Multi-Coil MRI Reconstruction Challenge -- Assessing Brain MRI Reconstruction Models and their Generalizability to Varying Coil Configurations

Deep-learning-based brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction methods have the potential to accelerate the MRI acquisition process. Nevertheless, the scientific community lacks appropriate benchmarks to assess MRI reconstruction quality of high-resolution brain images, and evaluate how these proposed algorithms will behave in the presence of small, but expected data distribution shifts. The Multi-Coil Magnetic Resonance Image (MC-MRI) Reconstruction Challenge provides a benchmark that aims at addressing these issues, using a large dataset of high-resolution, three-dimensional, T1-weighted MRI scans. The challenge has two primary goals: 1) to compare different MRI reconstruction models on this dataset and 2) to assess the generalizability of these models to data acquired with a different number of receiver coils. In this paper, we describe the challenge experimental design, and summarize the results of a set of baseline and state of the art brain MRI reconstruction models. We provide relevant comparative information on the current MRI reconstruction state-of-the-art and highlight the challenges of obtaining generalizable models that are required prior to broader clinical adoption. The MC-MRI benchmark data, evaluation code and current challenge leaderboard are publicly available. They provide an objective performance assessment for future developments in the field of brain MRI reconstruction.

  • 23 authors
·
Nov 9, 2020

The Bitter Lesson Learned from 2,000+ Multilingual Benchmarks

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in linguistic capabilities, robust multilingual evaluation has become essential for promoting equitable technological progress. This position paper examines over 2,000 multilingual (non-English) benchmarks from 148 countries, published between 2021 and 2024, to evaluate past, present, and future practices in multilingual benchmarking. Our findings reveal that, despite significant investments amounting to tens of millions of dollars, English remains significantly overrepresented in these benchmarks. Additionally, most benchmarks rely on original language content rather than translations, with the majority sourced from high-resource countries such as China, India, Germany, the UK, and the USA. Furthermore, a comparison of benchmark performance with human judgments highlights notable disparities. STEM-related tasks exhibit strong correlations with human evaluations (0.70 to 0.85), while traditional NLP tasks like question answering (e.g., XQuAD) show much weaker correlations (0.11 to 0.30). Moreover, translating English benchmarks into other languages proves insufficient, as localized benchmarks demonstrate significantly higher alignment with local human judgments (0.68) than their translated counterparts (0.47). This underscores the importance of creating culturally and linguistically tailored benchmarks rather than relying solely on translations. Through this comprehensive analysis, we highlight six key limitations in current multilingual evaluation practices, propose the guiding principles accordingly for effective multilingual benchmarking, and outline five critical research directions to drive progress in the field. Finally, we call for a global collaborative effort to develop human-aligned benchmarks that prioritize real-world applications.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 21 2

Multi-view X-ray Image Synthesis with Multiple Domain Disentanglement from CT Scans

X-ray images play a vital role in the intraoperative processes due to their high resolution and fast imaging speed and greatly promote the subsequent segmentation, registration and reconstruction. However, over-dosed X-rays superimpose potential risks to human health to some extent. Data-driven algorithms from volume scans to X-ray images are restricted by the scarcity of paired X-ray and volume data. Existing methods are mainly realized by modelling the whole X-ray imaging procedure. In this study, we propose a learning-based approach termed CT2X-GAN to synthesize the X-ray images in an end-to-end manner using the content and style disentanglement from three different image domains. Our method decouples the anatomical structure information from CT scans and style information from unpaired real X-ray images/ digital reconstructed radiography (DRR) images via a series of decoupling encoders. Additionally, we introduce a novel consistency regularization term to improve the stylistic resemblance between synthesized X-ray images and real X-ray images. Meanwhile, we also impose a supervised process by computing the similarity of computed real DRR and synthesized DRR images. We further develop a pose attention module to fully strengthen the comprehensive information in the decoupled content code from CT scans, facilitating high-quality multi-view image synthesis in the lower 2D space. Extensive experiments were conducted on the publicly available CTSpine1K dataset and achieved 97.8350, 0.0842 and 3.0938 in terms of FID, KID and defined user-scored X-ray similarity, respectively. In comparison with 3D-aware methods (pi-GAN, EG3D), CT2X-GAN is superior in improving the synthesis quality and realistic to the real X-ray images.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024

CRUXEval-X: A Benchmark for Multilingual Code Reasoning, Understanding and Execution

Code benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate Large Language Models' (LLMs) coding capabilities. However, there is an unignorable programming language bias in existing code benchmarks -- over 95% code generation benchmarks are dominated by Python, leaving the LLMs' capabilities in other programming languages such as Java and C/C++ unknown. Moreover, coding task bias is also crucial. Most benchmarks focus on code generation capability, while benchmarks for code reasoning (given input, reasoning output; and given output, reasoning input), an essential coding capability, are insufficient. Yet, constructing multi-lingual benchmarks can be expensive and labor-intensive, and codes in contest websites such as Leetcode suffer from data contamination during training. To fill this gap, we propose CRUXEVAL-X, a multi-lingual code reasoning benchmark that contains 19 programming languages. It comprises at least 600 subjects for each language, along with 19K content-consistent tests in total. In particular, the construction pipeline of CRUXEVAL-X works in a fully automated and test-guided manner, which iteratively generates and repairs based on execution feedback. Also, to cross language barriers (e.g., dynamic/static type systems in Python/C++), we formulated various transition rules between language pairs to facilitate translation. Our intensive evaluation of 24 representative LLMs reveals the correlation between language pairs. For example, TypeScript and JavaScript show a significant positive correlation, while Racket has less correlation with other languages. More interestingly, even a model trained solely on Python can achieve at most 34.4% Pass@1 in other languages, revealing the cross-language generalization of LLMs.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 23, 2024

AI in Lung Health: Benchmarking Detection and Diagnostic Models Across Multiple CT Scan Datasets

Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, and early detection through low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) has shown significant promise in reducing death rates. With the growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into medical imaging, the development and evaluation of robust AI models require access to large, well-annotated datasets. In this study, we introduce the utility of Duke Lung Cancer Screening (DLCS) Dataset, the largest open-access LDCT dataset with over 2,000 scans and 3,000 expert-verified nodules. We benchmark deep learning models for both 3D nodule detection and lung cancer classification across internal and external datasets including LUNA16, LUNA25, and NLST-3D+. For detection, we develop two MONAI-based RetinaNet models (DLCSDmD and LUNA16-mD), evaluated using the Competition Performance Metric (CPM). For classification, we compare five models, including state-of-the-art pretrained models (Models Genesis, Med3D), a selfsupervised foundation model (FMCB), a randomly initialized ResNet50, and proposed a novel Strategic Warm-Start++ (SWS++) model. SWS++ uses curated candidate patches to pretrain a classification backbone within the same detection pipeline, enabling task-relevant feature learning. Our models demonstrated strong generalizability, with SWS++ achieving comparable or superior performance to existing foundational models across multiple datasets (AUC: 0.71 to 0.90). All code, models, and data are publicly released to promote reproducibility and collaboration. This work establishes a standardized benchmarking resource for lung cancer AI research, supporting future efforts in model development, validation, and clinical translation.

  • 7 authors
·
May 7, 2024

CheXWorld: Exploring Image World Modeling for Radiograph Representation Learning

Humans can develop internal world models that encode common sense knowledge, telling them how the world works and predicting the consequences of their actions. This concept has emerged as a promising direction for establishing general-purpose machine-learning models in recent preliminary works, e.g., for visual representation learning. In this paper, we present CheXWorld, the first effort towards a self-supervised world model for radiographic images. Specifically, our work develops a unified framework that simultaneously models three aspects of medical knowledge essential for qualified radiologists, including 1) local anatomical structures describing the fine-grained characteristics of local tissues (e.g., architectures, shapes, and textures); 2) global anatomical layouts describing the global organization of the human body (e.g., layouts of organs and skeletons); and 3) domain variations that encourage CheXWorld to model the transitions across different appearance domains of radiographs (e.g., varying clarity, contrast, and exposure caused by collecting radiographs from different hospitals, devices, or patients). Empirically, we design tailored qualitative and quantitative analyses, revealing that CheXWorld successfully captures these three dimensions of medical knowledge. Furthermore, transfer learning experiments across eight medical image classification and segmentation benchmarks showcase that CheXWorld significantly outperforms existing SSL methods and large-scale medical foundation models. Code & pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/CheXWorld.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 18 2

Improving Performance, Robustness, and Fairness of Radiographic AI Models with Finely-Controllable Synthetic Data

Achieving robust performance and fairness across diverse patient populations remains a challenge in developing clinically deployable deep learning models for diagnostic imaging. Synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising strategy to address limitations in dataset scale and diversity. We introduce RoentGen-v2, a text-to-image diffusion model for chest radiographs that enables fine-grained control over both radiographic findings and patient demographic attributes, including sex, age, and race/ethnicity. RoentGen-v2 is the first model to generate clinically plausible images with demographic conditioning, facilitating the creation of a large, demographically balanced synthetic dataset comprising over 565,000 images. We use this large synthetic dataset to evaluate optimal training pipelines for downstream disease classification models. In contrast to prior work that combines real and synthetic data naively, we propose an improved training strategy that leverages synthetic data for supervised pretraining, followed by fine-tuning on real data. Through extensive evaluation on over 137,000 chest radiographs from five institutions, we demonstrate that synthetic pretraining consistently improves model performance, generalization to out-of-distribution settings, and fairness across demographic subgroups. Across datasets, synthetic pretraining led to a 6.5% accuracy increase in the performance of downstream classification models, compared to a modest 2.7% increase when naively combining real and synthetic data. We observe this performance improvement simultaneously with the reduction of the underdiagnosis fairness gap by 19.3%. These results highlight the potential of synthetic imaging to advance equitable and generalizable medical deep learning under real-world data constraints. We open source our code, trained models, and synthetic dataset at https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/RoentGen-v2 .

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 22

Benchmark Agreement Testing Done Right: A Guide for LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Recent advancements in Language Models (LMs) have catalyzed the creation of multiple benchmarks, designed to assess these models' general capabilities. A crucial task, however, is assessing the validity of the benchmarks themselves. This is most commonly done via Benchmark Agreement Testing (BAT), where new benchmarks are validated against established ones using some agreement metric (e.g., rank correlation). Despite the crucial role of BAT for benchmark builders and consumers, there are no standardized procedures for such agreement testing. This deficiency can lead to invalid conclusions, fostering mistrust in benchmarks and upending the ability to properly choose the appropriate benchmark to use. By analyzing over 40 prominent benchmarks, we demonstrate how some overlooked methodological choices can significantly influence BAT results, potentially undermining the validity of conclusions. To address these inconsistencies, we propose a set of best practices for BAT and demonstrate how utilizing these methodologies greatly improves BAT robustness and validity. To foster adoption and facilitate future research,, we introduce BenchBench, a python package for BAT, and release the BenchBench-leaderboard, a meta-benchmark designed to evaluate benchmarks using their peers. Our findings underscore the necessity for standardized BAT, ensuring the robustness and validity of benchmark evaluations in the evolving landscape of language model research. BenchBench Package: https://github.com/IBM/BenchBench Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/per/BenchBench

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024 3

Machine Learning for Shipwreck Segmentation from Side Scan Sonar Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark

Open-source benchmark datasets have been a critical component for advancing machine learning for robot perception in terrestrial applications. Benchmark datasets enable the widespread development of state-of-the-art machine learning methods, which require large datasets for training, validation, and thorough comparison to competing approaches. Underwater environments impose several operational challenges that hinder efforts to collect large benchmark datasets for marine robot perception. Furthermore, a low abundance of targets of interest relative to the size of the search space leads to increased time and cost required to collect useful datasets for a specific task. As a result, there is limited availability of labeled benchmark datasets for underwater applications. We present the AI4Shipwrecks dataset, which consists of 24 distinct shipwreck sites totaling 286 high-resolution labeled side scan sonar images to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous sonar image understanding. We leverage the unique abundance of targets in Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron, MI, to collect and compile a sonar imagery benchmark dataset through surveys with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We consulted with expert marine archaeologists for the labeling of robotically gathered data. We then leverage this dataset to perform benchmark experiments for comparison of state-of-the-art supervised segmentation methods, and we present insights on opportunities and open challenges for the field. The dataset and benchmarking tools will be released as an open-source benchmark dataset to spur innovation in machine learning for Great Lakes and ocean exploration. The dataset and accompanying software are available at https://umfieldrobotics.github.io/ai4shipwrecks/.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 25, 2024

PET2Rep: Towards Vision-Language Model-Drived Automated Radiology Report Generation for Positron Emission Tomography

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a cornerstone of modern oncologic and neurologic imaging, distinguished by its unique ability to illuminate dynamic metabolic processes that transcend the anatomical focus of traditional imaging technologies. Radiology reports are essential for clinical decision making, yet their manual creation is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recent advancements of vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential in medical applications, presenting a promising avenue for automating report generation. However, existing applications of VLMs in the medical domain have predominantly focused on structural imaging modalities, while the unique characteristics of molecular PET imaging have largely been overlooked. To bridge the gap, we introduce PET2Rep, a large-scale comprehensive benchmark for evaluation of general and medical VLMs for radiology report generation for PET images. PET2Rep stands out as the first dedicated dataset for PET report generation with metabolic information, uniquely capturing whole-body image-report pairs that cover dozens of organs to fill the critical gap in existing benchmarks and mirror real-world clinical comprehensiveness. In addition to widely recognized natural language generation metrics, we introduce a series of clinical efficiency metrics to evaluate the quality of radiotracer uptake pattern description in key organs in generated reports. We conduct a head-to-head comparison of 30 cutting-edge general-purpose and medical-specialized VLMs. The results show that the current state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly on PET report generation task, falling considerably short of fulfilling practical needs. Moreover, we identify several key insufficiency that need to be addressed to advance the development in medical applications.

  • 15 authors
·
Aug 5

Critical Evaluation of Deep Neural Networks for Wrist Fracture Detection

Wrist Fracture is the most common type of fracture with a high incidence rate. Conventional radiography (i.e. X-ray imaging) is used for wrist fracture detection routinely, but occasionally fracture delineation poses issues and an additional confirmation by computed tomography (CT) is needed for diagnosis. Recent advances in the field of Deep Learning (DL), a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI), have shown that wrist fracture detection can be automated using Convolutional Neural Networks. However, previous studies did not pay close attention to the difficult cases which can only be confirmed via CT imaging. In this study, we have developed and analyzed a state-of-the-art DL-based pipeline for wrist (distal radius) fracture detection -- DeepWrist, and evaluated it against one general population test set, and one challenging test set comprising only cases requiring confirmation by CT. Our results reveal that a typical state-of-the-art approach, such as DeepWrist, while having a near-perfect performance on the general independent test set, has a substantially lower performance on the challenging test set -- average precision of 0.99 (0.99-0.99) vs 0.64 (0.46-0.83), respectively. Similarly, the area under the ROC curve was of 0.99 (0.98-0.99) vs 0.84 (0.72-0.93), respectively. Our findings highlight the importance of a meticulous analysis of DL-based models before clinical use, and unearth the need for more challenging settings for testing medical AI systems.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 4, 2020

ReXGroundingCT: A 3D Chest CT Dataset for Segmentation of Findings from Free-Text Reports

We present ReXGroundingCT, the first publicly available dataset to link free-text radiology findings with pixel-level segmentations in 3D chest CT scans that is manually annotated. While prior datasets have relied on structured labels or predefined categories, ReXGroundingCT captures the full expressiveness of clinical language represented in free text and grounds it to spatially localized 3D segmentation annotations in volumetric imaging. This addresses a critical gap in medical AI: the ability to connect complex, descriptive text, such as "3 mm nodule in the left lower lobe", to its precise anatomical location in three-dimensional space, a capability essential for grounded radiology report generation systems. The dataset comprises 3,142 non-contrast chest CT scans paired with standardized radiology reports from the CT-RATE dataset. Using a systematic three-stage pipeline, GPT-4 was used to extract positive lung and pleural findings, which were then manually segmented by expert annotators. A total of 8,028 findings across 16,301 entities were annotated, with quality control performed by board-certified radiologists. Approximately 79% of findings are focal abnormalities, while 21% are non-focal. The training set includes up to three representative segmentations per finding, while the validation and test sets contain exhaustive labels for each finding entity. ReXGroundingCT establishes a new benchmark for developing and evaluating sentence-level grounding and free-text medical segmentation models in chest CT. The dataset can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/rajpurkarlab/ReXGroundingCT.

  • 23 authors
·
Jul 29

Benchmarking AI Models in Software Engineering: A Review, Search Tool, and Enhancement Protocol

Benchmarks are essential for consistent evaluation and reproducibility. The integration of Artificial Intelligence into Software Engineering (AI4SE) has given rise to numerous benchmarks for tasks such as code generation and bug fixing. However, this surge presents challenges: (1) scattered benchmark knowledge across tasks, (2) difficulty in selecting relevant benchmarks, (3) the absence of a uniform standard for benchmark development, and (4) limitations of existing benchmarks. In this paper, we review 173 studies and identify 204 AI4SE benchmarks. We classify these benchmarks, analyze their limitations, and expose gaps in practices. Based on our review, we created BenchScout, a semantic search tool to find relevant benchmarks, using automated clustering of the contexts from associated studies. We conducted a user study with 22 participants to evaluate BenchScout's usability, effectiveness, and intuitiveness which resulted in average scores of 4.5, 4.0, and 4.1 out of 5. To advance benchmarking standards, we propose BenchFrame, a unified method to enhance benchmark quality. As a case study, we applied BenchFrame to the HumanEval benchmark and addressed its main limitations. This led to HumanEvalNext, featuring (1) corrected errors, (2) improved language conversion, (3) expanded test coverage, and (4) increased difficulty. We then evaluated ten state-of-the-art code language models on HumanEval, HumanEvalPlus, and HumanEvalNext. On HumanEvalNext, models showed a pass@1 score reduction of 31.22% and 19.94% compared to HumanEval and HumanEvalPlus, respectively.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 7 2

Characterizing Deep Research: A Benchmark and Formal Definition

Information tasks such as writing surveys or analytical reports require complex search and reasoning, and have recently been grouped under the umbrella of deep research -- a term also adopted by recent models targeting these capabilities. Despite growing interest, the scope of the deep research task remains underdefined and its distinction from other reasoning-intensive problems is poorly understood. In this paper, we propose a formal characterization of the deep research (DR) task and introduce a benchmark to evaluate the performance of DR systems. We argue that the core defining feature of deep research is not the production of lengthy report-style outputs, but rather the high fan-out over concepts required during the search process, i.e., broad and reasoning-intensive exploration. To enable objective evaluation, we define DR using an intermediate output representation that encodes key claims uncovered during search-separating the reasoning challenge from surface-level report generation. Based on this formulation, we propose a diverse, challenging benchmark LiveDRBench with 100 challenging tasks over scientific topics (e.g., datasets, materials discovery, prior art search) and public interest events (e.g., flight incidents, movie awards). Across state-of-the-art DR systems, F1 score ranges between 0.02 and 0.72 for any sub-category. OpenAI's model performs the best with an overall F1 score of 0.55. Analysis of reasoning traces reveals the distribution over the number of referenced sources, branching, and backtracking events executed by current DR systems, motivating future directions for improving their search mechanisms and grounding capabilities. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LiveDRBench.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 6

AstroMLab 1: Who Wins Astronomy Jeopardy!?

We present a comprehensive evaluation of proprietary and open-weights large language models using the first astronomy-specific benchmarking dataset. This dataset comprises 4,425 multiple-choice questions curated from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, covering a broad range of astrophysical topics. Our analysis examines model performance across various astronomical subfields and assesses response calibration, crucial for potential deployment in research environments. Claude-3.5-Sonnet outperforms competitors by up to 4.6 percentage points, achieving 85.0% accuracy. For proprietary models, we observed a universal reduction in cost every 3-to-12 months to achieve similar score in this particular astronomy benchmark. Open-source models have rapidly improved, with LLaMA-3-70b (80.6%) and Qwen-2-72b (77.7%) now competing with some of the best proprietary models. We identify performance variations across topics, with non-English-focused models generally struggling more in exoplanet-related fields, stellar astrophysics, and instrumentation related questions. These challenges likely stem from less abundant training data, limited historical context, and rapid recent developments in these areas. This pattern is observed across both open-weights and proprietary models, with regional dependencies evident, highlighting the impact of training data diversity on model performance in specialized scientific domains. Top-performing models demonstrate well-calibrated confidence, with correlations above 0.9 between confidence and correctness, though they tend to be slightly underconfident. The development for fast, low-cost inference of open-weights models presents new opportunities for affordable deployment in astronomy. The rapid progress observed suggests that LLM-driven research in astronomy may become feasible in the near future.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024

GL-LCM: Global-Local Latent Consistency Models for Fast High-Resolution Bone Suppression in Chest X-Ray Images

Chest X-Ray (CXR) imaging for pulmonary diagnosis raises significant challenges, primarily because bone structures can obscure critical details necessary for accurate diagnosis. Recent advances in deep learning, particularly with diffusion models, offer significant promise for effectively minimizing the visibility of bone structures in CXR images, thereby improving clarity and diagnostic accuracy. Nevertheless, existing diffusion-based methods for bone suppression in CXR imaging struggle to balance the complete suppression of bones with preserving local texture details. Additionally, their high computational demand and extended processing time hinder their practical use in clinical settings. To address these limitations, we introduce a Global-Local Latent Consistency Model (GL-LCM) architecture. This model combines lung segmentation, dual-path sampling, and global-local fusion, enabling fast high-resolution bone suppression in CXR images. To tackle potential boundary artifacts and detail blurring in local-path sampling, we further propose Local-Enhanced Guidance, which addresses these issues without additional training. Comprehensive experiments on a self-collected dataset SZCH-X-Rays, and the public dataset JSRT, reveal that our GL-LCM delivers superior bone suppression and remarkable computational efficiency, significantly outperforming several competitive methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/diaoquesang/GL-LCM.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 5

High-order finite element method for atomic structure calculations

We introduce featom, an open source code that implements a high-order finite element solver for the radial Schr\"odinger, Dirac, and Kohn-Sham equations. The formulation accommodates various mesh types, such as uniform or exponential, and the convergence can be systematically controlled by increasing the number and/or polynomial order of the finite element basis functions. The Dirac equation is solved using a squared Hamiltonian approach to eliminate spurious states. To address the slow convergence of the kappa=pm1 states due to divergent derivatives at the origin, we incorporate known asymptotic forms into the solutions. We achieve a high level of accuracy (10^{-8} Hartree) for total energies and eigenvalues of heavy atoms such as uranium in both Schr\"odinger and Dirac Kohn-Sham solutions. We provide detailed convergence studies and computational parameters required to attain commonly required accuracies. Finally, we compare our results with known analytic results as well as the results of other methods. In particular, we calculate benchmark results for atomic numbers (Z) from 1 to 92, verifying current benchmarks. We demonstrate significant speedup compared to the state-of-the-art shooting solver dftatom. An efficient, modular Fortran 2008 implementation, is provided under an open source, permissive license, including examples and tests, wherein particular emphasis is placed on the independence (no global variables), reusability, and generality of the individual routines.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2023

VerSe: A Vertebrae Labelling and Segmentation Benchmark for Multi-detector CT Images

Vertebral labelling and segmentation are two fundamental tasks in an automated spine processing pipeline. Reliable and accurate processing of spine images is expected to benefit clinical decision-support systems for diagnosis, surgery planning, and population-based analysis on spine and bone health. However, designing automated algorithms for spine processing is challenging predominantly due to considerable variations in anatomy and acquisition protocols and due to a severe shortage of publicly available data. Addressing these limitations, the Large Scale Vertebrae Segmentation Challenge (VerSe) was organised in conjunction with the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in 2019 and 2020, with a call for algorithms towards labelling and segmentation of vertebrae. Two datasets containing a total of 374 multi-detector CT scans from 355 patients were prepared and 4505 vertebrae have individually been annotated at voxel-level by a human-machine hybrid algorithm (https://osf.io/nqjyw/, https://osf.io/t98fz/). A total of 25 algorithms were benchmarked on these datasets. In this work, we present the the results of this evaluation and further investigate the performance-variation at vertebra-level, scan-level, and at different fields-of-view. We also evaluate the generalisability of the approaches to an implicit domain shift in data by evaluating the top performing algorithms of one challenge iteration on data from the other iteration. The principal takeaway from VerSe: the performance of an algorithm in labelling and segmenting a spine scan hinges on its ability to correctly identify vertebrae in cases of rare anatomical variations. The content and code concerning VerSe can be accessed at: https://github.com/anjany/verse.

  • 69 authors
·
Jan 24, 2020

IDEA-Bench: How Far are Generative Models from Professional Designing?

Real-world design tasks - such as picture book creation, film storyboard development using character sets, photo retouching, visual effects, and font transfer - are highly diverse and complex, requiring deep interpretation and extraction of various elements from instructions, descriptions, and reference images. The resulting images often implicitly capture key features from references or user inputs, making it challenging to develop models that can effectively address such varied tasks. While existing visual generative models can produce high-quality images based on prompts, they face significant limitations in professional design scenarios that involve varied forms and multiple inputs and outputs, even when enhanced with adapters like ControlNets and LoRAs. To address this, we introduce IDEA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing 100 real-world design tasks, including rendering, visual effects, storyboarding, picture books, fonts, style-based, and identity-preserving generation, with 275 test cases to thoroughly evaluate a model's general-purpose generation capabilities. Notably, even the best-performing model only achieves 22.48 on IDEA-Bench, while the best general-purpose model only achieves 6.81. We provide a detailed analysis of these results, highlighting the inherent challenges and providing actionable directions for improvement. Additionally, we provide a subset of 18 representative tasks equipped with multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based auto-evaluation techniques to facilitate rapid model development and comparison. We releases the benchmark data, evaluation toolkits, and an online leaderboard at https://github.com/ali-vilab/IDEA-Bench, aiming to drive the advancement of generative models toward more versatile and applicable intelligent design systems.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024

Towards Generalist Biomedical AI

Medicine is inherently multimodal, with rich data modalities spanning text, imaging, genomics, and more. Generalist biomedical artificial intelligence (AI) systems that flexibly encode, integrate, and interpret this data at scale can potentially enable impactful applications ranging from scientific discovery to care delivery. To enable the development of these models, we first curate MultiMedBench, a new multimodal biomedical benchmark. MultiMedBench encompasses 14 diverse tasks such as medical question answering, mammography and dermatology image interpretation, radiology report generation and summarization, and genomic variant calling. We then introduce Med-PaLM Multimodal (Med-PaLM M), our proof of concept for a generalist biomedical AI system. Med-PaLM M is a large multimodal generative model that flexibly encodes and interprets biomedical data including clinical language, imaging, and genomics with the same set of model weights. Med-PaLM M reaches performance competitive with or exceeding the state of the art on all MultiMedBench tasks, often surpassing specialist models by a wide margin. We also report examples of zero-shot generalization to novel medical concepts and tasks, positive transfer learning across tasks, and emergent zero-shot medical reasoning. To further probe the capabilities and limitations of Med-PaLM M, we conduct a radiologist evaluation of model-generated (and human) chest X-ray reports and observe encouraging performance across model scales. In a side-by-side ranking on 246 retrospective chest X-rays, clinicians express a pairwise preference for Med-PaLM M reports over those produced by radiologists in up to 40.50% of cases, suggesting potential clinical utility. While considerable work is needed to validate these models in real-world use cases, our results represent a milestone towards the development of generalist biomedical AI systems.

  • 32 authors
·
Jul 26, 2023

AdverX-Ray: Ensuring X-Ray Integrity Through Frequency-Sensitive Adversarial VAEs

Ensuring the quality and integrity of medical images is crucial for maintaining diagnostic accuracy in deep learning-based Computer-Aided Diagnosis and Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) systems. Covariate shifts are subtle variations in the data distribution caused by different imaging devices or settings and can severely degrade model performance, similar to the effects of adversarial attacks. Therefore, it is vital to have a lightweight and fast method to assess the quality of these images prior to using CAD models. AdverX-Ray addresses this need by serving as an image-quality assessment layer, designed to detect covariate shifts effectively. This Adversarial Variational Autoencoder prioritizes the discriminator's role, using the suboptimal outputs of the generator as negative samples to fine-tune the discriminator's ability to identify high-frequency artifacts. Images generated by adversarial networks often exhibit severe high-frequency artifacts, guiding the discriminator to focus excessively on these components. This makes the discriminator ideal for this approach. Trained on patches from X-ray images of specific machine models, AdverX-Ray can evaluate whether a scan matches the training distribution, or if a scan from the same machine is captured under different settings. Extensive comparisons with various OOD detection methods show that AdverX-Ray significantly outperforms existing techniques, achieving a 96.2% average AUROC using only 64 random patches from an X-ray. Its lightweight and fast architecture makes it suitable for real-time applications, enhancing the reliability of medical imaging systems. The code and pretrained models are publicly available.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 23

Foundation Model-oriented Robustness: Robust Image Model Evaluation with Pretrained Models

Machine learning has demonstrated remarkable performance over finite datasets, yet whether the scores over the fixed benchmarks can sufficiently indicate the model's performance in the real world is still in discussion. In reality, an ideal robust model will probably behave similarly to the oracle (e.g., the human users), thus a good evaluation protocol is probably to evaluate the models' behaviors in comparison to the oracle. In this paper, we introduce a new robustness measurement that directly measures the image classification model's performance compared with a surrogate oracle (i.e., a foundation model). Besides, we design a simple method that can accomplish the evaluation beyond the scope of the benchmarks. Our method extends the image datasets with new samples that are sufficiently perturbed to be distinct from the ones in the original sets, but are still bounded within the same image-label structure the original test image represents, constrained by a foundation model pretrained with a large amount of samples. As a result, our new method will offer us a new way to evaluate the models' robustness performance, free of limitations of fixed benchmarks or constrained perturbations, although scoped by the power of the oracle. In addition to the evaluation results, we also leverage our generated data to understand the behaviors of the model and our new evaluation strategies.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 21, 2023

Patherea: Cell Detection and Classification for the 2020s

This paper presents a Patherea, a framework for point-based cell detection and classification that provides a complete solution for developing and evaluating state-of-the-art approaches. We introduce a large-scale dataset collected to directly replicate a clinical workflow for Ki-67 proliferation index estimation and use it to develop an efficient point-based approach that directly predicts point-based predictions, without the need for intermediate representations. The proposed approach effectively utilizes point proposal candidates with the hybrid Hungarian matching strategy and a flexible architecture that enables the usage of various backbones and (pre)training strategies. We report state-of-the-art results on existing public datasets - Lizard, BRCA-M2C, BCData, and the newly proposed Patherea dataset. We show that the performance on existing public datasets is saturated and that the newly proposed Patherea dataset represents a significantly harder challenge for the recently proposed approaches. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of recently proposed pathology foundational models that our proposed approach can natively utilize and benefit from. We also revisit the evaluation protocol that is used in the broader field of cell detection and classification and identify the erroneous calculation of performance metrics. Patherea provides a benchmarking utility that addresses the identified issues and enables a fair comparison of different approaches. The dataset and the code will be publicly released upon acceptance.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 20, 2024

Enhanced Contrastive Learning with Multi-view Longitudinal Data for Chest X-ray Report Generation

Automated radiology report generation offers an effective solution to alleviate radiologists' workload. However, most existing methods focus primarily on single or fixed-view images to model current disease conditions, which limits diagnostic accuracy and overlooks disease progression. Although some approaches utilize longitudinal data to track disease progression, they still rely on single images to analyze current visits. To address these issues, we propose enhanced contrastive learning with Multi-view Longitudinal data to facilitate chest X-ray Report Generation, named MLRG. Specifically, we introduce a multi-view longitudinal contrastive learning method that integrates spatial information from current multi-view images and temporal information from longitudinal data. This method also utilizes the inherent spatiotemporal information of radiology reports to supervise the pre-training of visual and textual representations. Subsequently, we present a tokenized absence encoding technique to flexibly handle missing patient-specific prior knowledge, allowing the model to produce more accurate radiology reports based on available prior knowledge. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR, MIMIC-ABN, and Two-view CXR datasets demonstrate that our MLRG outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 2.3% BLEU-4 improvement on MIMIC-CXR, a 5.5% F1 score improvement on MIMIC-ABN, and a 2.7% F1 RadGraph improvement on Two-view CXR.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 27

TabStruct: Measuring Structural Fidelity of Tabular Data

Evaluating tabular generators remains a challenging problem, as the unique causal structural prior of heterogeneous tabular data does not lend itself to intuitive human inspection. Recent work has introduced structural fidelity as a tabular-specific evaluation dimension to assess whether synthetic data complies with the causal structures of real data. However, existing benchmarks often neglect the interplay between structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions, thus failing to provide a holistic understanding of model performance. Moreover, they are typically limited to toy datasets, as quantifying existing structural fidelity metrics requires access to ground-truth causal structures, which are rarely available for real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework that jointly considers structural fidelity and conventional evaluation dimensions. We introduce a new evaluation metric, global utility, which enables the assessment of structural fidelity even in the absence of ground-truth causal structures. In addition, we present TabStruct, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark offering large-scale quantitative analysis on 13 tabular generators from nine distinct categories, across 29 datasets. Our results demonstrate that global utility provides a task-independent, domain-agnostic lens for tabular generator performance. We release the TabStruct benchmark suite, including all datasets, evaluation pipelines, and raw results. Code is available at https://github.com/SilenceX12138/TabStruct.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 15 1

SegBook: A Simple Baseline and Cookbook for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation

Computed Tomography (CT) is one of the most popular modalities for medical imaging. By far, CT images have contributed to the largest publicly available datasets for volumetric medical segmentation tasks, covering full-body anatomical structures. Large amounts of full-body CT images provide the opportunity to pre-train powerful models, e.g., STU-Net pre-trained in a supervised fashion, to segment numerous anatomical structures. However, it remains unclear in which conditions these pre-trained models can be transferred to various downstream medical segmentation tasks, particularly segmenting the other modalities and diverse targets. To address this problem, a large-scale benchmark for comprehensive evaluation is crucial for finding these conditions. Thus, we collected 87 public datasets varying in modality, target, and sample size to evaluate the transfer ability of full-body CT pre-trained models. We then employed a representative model, STU-Net with multiple model scales, to conduct transfer learning across modalities and targets. Our experimental results show that (1) there may be a bottleneck effect concerning the dataset size in fine-tuning, with more improvement on both small- and large-scale datasets than medium-size ones. (2) Models pre-trained on full-body CT demonstrate effective modality transfer, adapting well to other modalities such as MRI. (3) Pre-training on the full-body CT not only supports strong performance in structure detection but also shows efficacy in lesion detection, showcasing adaptability across target tasks. We hope that this large-scale open evaluation of transfer learning can direct future research in volumetric medical image segmentation.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 21, 2024 2

FG-CXR: A Radiologist-Aligned Gaze Dataset for Enhancing Interpretability in Chest X-Ray Report Generation

Developing an interpretable system for generating reports in chest X-ray (CXR) analysis is becoming increasingly crucial in Computer-aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems, enabling radiologists to comprehend the decisions made by these systems. Despite the growth of diverse datasets and methods focusing on report generation, there remains a notable gap in how closely these models' generated reports align with the interpretations of real radiologists. In this study, we tackle this challenge by initially introducing Fine-Grained CXR (FG-CXR) dataset, which provides fine-grained paired information between the captions generated by radiologists and the corresponding gaze attention heatmaps for each anatomy. Unlike existing datasets that include a raw sequence of gaze alongside a report, with significant misalignment between gaze location and report content, our FG-CXR dataset offers a more grained alignment between gaze attention and diagnosis transcript. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that simply applying black-box image captioning methods to generate reports cannot adequately explain which information in CXR is utilized and how long needs to attend to accurately generate reports. Consequently, we propose a novel explainable radiologist's attention generator network (Gen-XAI) that mimics the diagnosis process of radiologists, explicitly constraining its output to closely align with both radiologist's gaze attention and transcript. Finally, we perform extensive experiments to illustrate the effectiveness of our method. Our datasets and checkpoint is available at https://github.com/UARK-AICV/FG-CXR.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024

Signal and Noise: A Framework for Reducing Uncertainty in Language Model Evaluation

Developing large language models is expensive and involves making decisions with small experiments, typically by evaluating on large, multi-task evaluation suites. In this work, we analyze specific properties which make a benchmark more reliable for such decisions, and interventions to design higher-quality evaluation benchmarks. We introduce two key metrics that show differences in current benchmarks: signal, a benchmark's ability to separate better models from worse models, and noise, a benchmark's sensitivity to random variability between training steps. We demonstrate that benchmarks with a better signal-to-noise ratio are more reliable when making decisions at small scale, and those with less noise have lower scaling law prediction error. These results suggest that improving signal or noise will lead to more useful benchmarks, so we introduce three interventions designed to directly affect signal or noise. For example, we propose that switching to a metric that has better signal and noise (e.g., perplexity rather than accuracy) leads to better reliability and improved scaling law error. We also find that filtering noisy subtasks, to improve an aggregate signal-to-noise ratio, leads to more reliable multi-task evaluations. We also find that averaging the output of a model's intermediate checkpoints to reduce noise leads to consistent improvements. We conclude by recommending that those creating new benchmarks, or selecting which existing benchmarks to use, aim for high signal and low noise. We use 30 benchmarks for these experiments, and 375 open-weight language models from 60M to 32B parameters, resulting in a new, publicly available dataset of 900K evaluation benchmark results, totaling 200M instances.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 18

RoentGen: Vision-Language Foundation Model for Chest X-ray Generation

Multimodal models trained on large natural image-text pair datasets have exhibited astounding abilities in generating high-quality images. Medical imaging data is fundamentally different to natural images, and the language used to succinctly capture relevant details in medical data uses a different, narrow but semantically rich, domain-specific vocabulary. Not surprisingly, multi-modal models trained on natural image-text pairs do not tend to generalize well to the medical domain. Developing generative imaging models faithfully representing medical concepts while providing compositional diversity could mitigate the existing paucity of high-quality, annotated medical imaging datasets. In this work, we develop a strategy to overcome the large natural-medical distributional shift by adapting a pre-trained latent diffusion model on a corpus of publicly available chest x-rays (CXR) and their corresponding radiology (text) reports. We investigate the model's ability to generate high-fidelity, diverse synthetic CXR conditioned on text prompts. We assess the model outputs quantitatively using image quality metrics, and evaluate image quality and text-image alignment by human domain experts. We present evidence that the resulting model (RoentGen) is able to create visually convincing, diverse synthetic CXR images, and that the output can be controlled to a new extent by using free-form text prompts including radiology-specific language. Fine-tuning this model on a fixed training set and using it as a data augmentation method, we measure a 5% improvement of a classifier trained jointly on synthetic and real images, and a 3% improvement when trained on a larger but purely synthetic training set. Finally, we observe that this fine-tuning distills in-domain knowledge in the text-encoder and can improve its representation capabilities of certain diseases like pneumothorax by 25%.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 23, 2022

Delving into Masked Autoencoders for Multi-Label Thorax Disease Classification

Vision Transformer (ViT) has become one of the most popular neural architectures due to its great scalability, computational efficiency, and compelling performance in many vision tasks. However, ViT has shown inferior performance to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) on medical tasks due to its data-hungry nature and the lack of annotated medical data. In this paper, we pre-train ViTs on 266,340 chest X-rays using Masked Autoencoders (MAE) which reconstruct missing pixels from a small part of each image. For comparison, CNNs are also pre-trained on the same 266,340 X-rays using advanced self-supervised methods (e.g., MoCo v2). The results show that our pre-trained ViT performs comparably (sometimes better) to the state-of-the-art CNN (DenseNet-121) for multi-label thorax disease classification. This performance is attributed to the strong recipes extracted from our empirical studies for pre-training and fine-tuning ViT. The pre-training recipe signifies that medical reconstruction requires a much smaller proportion of an image (10% vs. 25%) and a more moderate random resized crop range (0.5~1.0 vs. 0.2~1.0) compared with natural imaging. Furthermore, we remark that in-domain transfer learning is preferred whenever possible. The fine-tuning recipe discloses that layer-wise LR decay, RandAug magnitude, and DropPath rate are significant factors to consider. We hope that this study can direct future research on the application of Transformers to a larger variety of medical imaging tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 23, 2022

Mask of truth: model sensitivity to unexpected regions of medical images

The development of larger models for medical image analysis has led to increased performance. However, it also affected our ability to explain and validate model decisions. Models can use non-relevant parts of images, also called spurious correlations or shortcuts, to obtain high performance on benchmark datasets but fail in real-world scenarios. In this work, we challenge the capacity of convolutional neural networks (CNN) to classify chest X-rays and eye fundus images while masking out clinically relevant parts of the image. We show that all models trained on the PadChest dataset, irrespective of the masking strategy, are able to obtain an Area Under the Curve (AUC) above random. Moreover, the models trained on full images obtain good performance on images without the region of interest (ROI), even superior to the one obtained on images only containing the ROI. We also reveal a possible spurious correlation in the Chaksu dataset while the performances are more aligned with the expectation of an unbiased model. We go beyond the performance analysis with the usage of the explainability method SHAP and the analysis of embeddings. We asked a radiology resident to interpret chest X-rays under different masking to complement our findings with clinical knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/TheoSourget/MMC_Masking and https://github.com/TheoSourget/MMC_Masking_EyeFundus

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI

This comprehensive study evaluates the performance of OpenAI's o1-preview large language model across a diverse array of complex reasoning tasks, spanning multiple domains, including computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, linguistics, and social sciences. Through rigorous testing, o1-preview demonstrated remarkable capabilities, often achieving human-level or superior performance in areas ranging from coding challenges to scientific reasoning and from language processing to creative problem-solving. Key findings include: -83.3% success rate in solving complex competitive programming problems, surpassing many human experts. -Superior ability in generating coherent and accurate radiology reports, outperforming other evaluated models. -100% accuracy in high school-level mathematical reasoning tasks, providing detailed step-by-step solutions. -Advanced natural language inference capabilities across general and specialized domains like medicine. -Impressive performance in chip design tasks, outperforming specialized models in areas such as EDA script generation and bug analysis. -Remarkable proficiency in anthropology and geology, demonstrating deep understanding and reasoning in these specialized fields. -Strong capabilities in quantitative investing. O1 has comprehensive financial knowledge and statistical modeling skills. -Effective performance in social media analysis, including sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. The model excelled particularly in tasks requiring intricate reasoning and knowledge integration across various fields. While some limitations were observed, including occasional errors on simpler problems and challenges with certain highly specialized concepts, the overall results indicate significant progress towards artificial general intelligence.

  • 78 authors
·
Sep 27, 2024

All that structure matches does not glitter

Generative models for materials, especially inorganic crystals, hold potential to transform the theoretical prediction of novel compounds and structures. Advancement in this field depends critically on robust benchmarks and minimal, information-rich datasets that enable meaningful model evaluation. This paper critically examines common datasets and reported metrics for a crystal structure prediction taskx2014generating the most likely structures given the chemical composition of a material. We focus on three key issues: First, materials datasets should contain unique crystal structures; for example, we show that the widely-utilized carbon-24 dataset only contains approx40% unique structures. Second, materials datasets should not be split randomly if polymorphs of many different compositions are numerous, which we find to be the case for the perov-5 dataset. Third, benchmarks can mislead if used uncritically, e.g., reporting a match rate metric without considering the structural variety exhibited by identical building blocks. To address these oft-overlooked issues, we introduce several fixes. We provide revised versions of the carbon-24 dataset: one with duplicates removed, one deduplicated and split by number of atoms N, and two containing only identical structures but with different unit cells. We also propose a new split for the perov-5 dataset which ensures polymorphs are grouped within each split subset, setting a more sensible standard for benchmarking model performance. Finally, we present METRe and cRMSE, new model evaluation metrics that can correct existing issues with the match rate metric.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 15