ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Recent generative pre-trained vision–language (GPTv) models have achieved remarkable success in multi-modal understanding, inspiring their adaptation to medical imaging tasks such as disease diagnosis and visual question answering (VQA). However, current instruction-tuned GPTv models suffer from two key challenges: (1) medical attributes (e.g., disease names, severity grades) are encoded as plain text tokens, collapsing semantically distinct concepts into nearly identical textual sequences; and (2) inadequate textual supervision weakens visual representation learning, leading to severe inter-attribute confusion and misaligned vision–language embeddings. To address these limitations, we introduce attribute tokens (AttTok), a set of pre‑defined special tokens that uniquely encode clinical attributes (e.g., imaging modality, diagnosis, severity) within a structured token space. Complemented by attribute‑centric embedding books, AttTok serves as anchor points for aligning both visual and textual modalities into a shared, discriminative representation space.
