搜索医学 AI 论文与资源

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The ability to distinguish subtle differences between visually similar images is essential for diverse domains such as industrial anomaly detection, medical imaging, and aerial surveillance. While comparative reasoning benchmarks for vision-language models (VLMs) have recently emerged, they primarily focus on images with large, salient differences and fail to capture the nuanced reasoning required for real-world applications. In this work, we introduce **VLM-SubtleBench**, a benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs on *subtle comparative reasoning*. Our benchmark covers ten difference types—Attribute, State, Emotion, Temporal, Spatial, Existence, Quantity, Quality, Viewpoint, and Action—and curate paired question–image sets reflecting these fine-grained variations.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. This paper aims to develop a lower prediction bound (LPB) for survival time across different treatments in the general right-censored setting. Although previous methods have utilized conformal prediction to construct the LPB, their resulting prediction sets provide only probably approximately correct (PAC)–type miscoverage guarantees rather than exact ones. To address this problem, we propose a new calibration procedure under the potential outcome framework. Under the strong ignorability assumption, we propose a reweighting scheme that can transform the problem into a weighted conformal inference problem, allowing an LPB to be obtained via quantile regression with an exact miscoverage guarantee.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The human brain is the most efficient and versatile system for processing dynamic visual input. By comparing representations from deep video models to brain activity, we can gain insights into mechanistic solutions for effective video processing, important to better understand the brain and to build better models. Current works in model-brain alignment primarily focus on fMRI measurements, leaving open questions about fine-grained dynamic processing. Here, we introduce the first large-scale model benchmarking on alignment to dynamic electroencephalography (EEG) recordings of short natural videos. We analyze 100+ models across the axes of temporal integration, classification task, architecture, and pretraining, using our proposed Cross-Temporal Representational Similarity Analysis (CT-RSA) which matches the best time-unfolded model features to dynamically evolving brain responses, distilling $10^7$ alignment scores.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. We present a dynamical-systems based model for resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), trained on a dataset of roughly $40$K rs-fMRI sequences covering a wide variety of public and available-by-permission datasets. While most existing proposals use transformer backbones, we utilize multi-resolution temporal modeling of the dynamics across parcellated brain regions. We show that MnemoDyn is compute efficient and generalizes very well across diverse populations and scanning protocols. When benchmarked against current state-of-the-art transformer-based approaches, MnemoDyn consistently delivers superior reconstruction quality.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Anomaly detection is a critical task in computer vision with profound implications for medical imaging, where identifying pathologies early can directly impact patient outcomes. While recent unsupervised anomaly detection approaches show promise, they require substantial normal training data and struggle to generalize across anatomical contexts. We introduce D$^2$4FAD, a novel dual distillation framework for few-shot anomaly detection that identifies anomalies in previously unseen tasks using only a small number of normal reference images. Our approach leverages a pre-trained encoder as a teacher network to extract multi-scale features from both support and query images, while a student decoder learns to distill knowledge from the teacher on query images and self-distill on support images. Code/project link: https://github.com/ttttqz/D24FAD

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Adapters have become a widely adopted strategy for efficient fine-tuning of foundation models, particularly in resource-constrained settings. However, their performance under extreme data scarcity—common in medical imaging due to high annotation costs, privacy regulations, and fragmented datasets—remains underexplored. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of adapter-based fine-tuning for vision foundation models in low-data medical imaging scenarios. We find that, contrary to their promise, conventional Adapters can degrade performance under severe data constraints, performing even worse than simple linear probing when trained on less than 1\% of the corresponding training data.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) from right-censored survival data is critical in high-stakes applications such as precision medicine and individualized policy-making. Yet, the survival analysis setting poses unique challenges for HTE estimation due to censoring, unobserved counterfactuals, and complex identification assumptions. Despite recent advances, from causal survival forests to survival meta-learners and outcome imputation approaches, evaluation practices remain fragmented and inconsistent. We introduce SurvHTE‐Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark for HTE estimation with censored outcomes. The benchmark spans (i) a modular suite of synthetic datasets with known ground truth, systematically varying causal assumptions and survival dynamics, (ii) semi-synthetic datasets that pair real-world covariates with simulated treatments and outcomes, and (iii) real-world datasets from a twin study (with known ground truth) and from an HIV clinical trial.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Surgical triplet detection is a critical task in surgical video analysis, with significant implications for performance assessment and training novice surgeons. However, existing datasets like CholecT50 lack precise spatial bounding box annotations, rendering triplet classification at the image level insufficient for practical applications. The inclusion of bounding box annotations is essential to make this task meaningful, as they provide the spatial context necessary for accurate analysis and improved model generalizability. To address these shortcomings, we introduce ProstaTD, a large-scale, multi-institutional dataset for surgical triplet detection, developed from the technically demanding domain of robot-assisted prostatectomy.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Arabic remains one of the most underrepresented languages in natural language processing research, particularly in medical applications, due to the limited availability of open-source data and benchmarks. The lack of resources hinders efforts to evaluate and advance the multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce MedAraBench, a large-scale dataset consisting of Arabic multiple-choice question-answer pairs across various medical specialties. We constructed the dataset by manually digitizing a large repository of academic materials created by medical professionals in the Arabic-speaking region.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Lightweight 3D medical image segmentation remains constrained by a fundamental "efficiency / robustness conflict", particularly when processing complex anatomical structures and heterogeneous modalities. In this paper, we study how to redesign the framework based on the characteristics of high-dimensional 3D images, and explore data synergy to overcome the fragile representation of lightweight methods. Our approach, VeloxSeg, begins with a deployable and extensible dual-stream CNN-Transformer architecture composed of Paired Window Attention (PWA) and Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma-guided convolution (JLC). For each 3D image, we invoke a "glance-and-focus" principle, where PWA rapidly retrieves multi-scale information, and JLC ensures robust local feature extraction with minimal parameters, significantly enhancing the model's ability to operate with low computational budget. Code/project link: https://github.com/JinPLu/VeloxSeg

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Predicting spatial gene expression from H\&E histology offers a scalable and clinically accessible alternative to sequencing, but realizing clinical impact requires models that generalize across cancer types and capture biologically coherent signals. Prior work is often limited to per-cancer settings and variance-based evaluation, leaving functional relevance underexplored. We introduce HistoPrism, an efficient transformer-based architecture for pan-cancer prediction of gene expression from histology. To evaluate biological meaning, we introduce a pathway-level benchmark, shifting assessment from isolated gene-level variance to coherent functional pathways.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Diffusion models have recently emerged as powerful priors for solving inverse problems. While Computed Tomography (CT) is theoretically a linear inverse problem, it poses many practical challenges. These include correlated noise, artifact structures, reliance on system geometry, and misaligned value ranges, which make the direct application of diffusion models more difficult than in domains like natural image generation. To systematically evaluate how diffusion models perform in this context and compare them with established reconstruction methods, we introduce DM4CT, a comprehensive benchmark for CT reconstruction. Code/project link: https://github.com/DM4CT/DM4CT

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Systematic reviews (SR), in which experts summarize and analyze evidence across individual studies to provide insights on a specialized topic, are a cornerstone for evidence-based clinical decision-making, research, and policy. Given the exponential growth of scientific articles, there is growing interest in using large language models (LLMs) to automate SR generation. However, the ability of LLMs to critically assess evidence and reason across multiple documents to provide recommendations at the same proficiency as domain experts remains poorly characterized. We therefore ask: **Can LLMs match the conclusions of systematic reviews written by clinical experts when given access to the same studies?** To explore this question, we present MedEvidence, a benchmark pairing findings from 100 medical SRs with the studies they are based on.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Effective information seeking in multi-turn medical dialogues is critical for accurate diagnosis, especially when dealing with incomplete information. Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) for these interactive scenarios is challenging due to the uncertainty inherent in user-agent interactions, which we formulate as a Hierarchical Markov Decision Process (H-MDP). While conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) struggle with long-horizon credit assignment and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) suffers from unstable value estimation in this context, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware Adaptive Tree Policy Optimization (ATPO) algorithm. Our method adaptively allocates the rollout budget to states with high uncertainty, quantified by a composite metric of Bellman error and action-value variance.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Generalist multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a wide range of vision-language tasks. However, their performance on medical tasks—particularly in zero-shot settings where generalization is critical—remains suboptimal. A key research gap is the limited understanding of why medical MLLMs underperform in medical image interpretation. **In this work**, we present a pioneering systematic investigation into the visual grounding capabilities of state-of-the-art medical MLLMs. To disentangle *visual grounding* from *semantic grounding*, we design VGMED, a novel evaluation dataset developed with expert clinical guidance, explicitly assessing the visual grounding capability of medical MLLMs. Code/project link: https://guimeng-leo-liu.github.io/Medical-MLLMs-Fail/

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. In precision medicine, quantitative multi-omic features, topological context, and textual biological knowledge play vital roles in identifying disease-critical signaling pathways and targets, guiding the discovery of novel therapeutics and effective treatment strategies. Existing pipelines capture only one or two of these—numerical omics ignore topological context, text-centric LLMs lack quantitative grounded reasoning, and graph-only models underuse rich node semantics and the generalization power of LLMs—thereby limiting mechanistic interpretability. Although Process Reward Models (PRMs) aim to guide reasoning in LLMs, they remain limited by coarse step definitions, unreliable intermediate evaluation, and vulnerability to reward hacking with added computational cost. These gaps motivate jointly integrating quantitative multi-omic signals, topological structure with node annotations, and literature-scale text via LLMs, using subgraph reasoning as the principle bridge linking numeric evidence, topological knowledge and language context.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The professionalism of a human doctor in outpatient service depends on two core abilities: the ability to make accurate medical decisions and the medical consultation skill to conduct strategic, empathetic patient inquiry. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable accuracy on medical decision-making benchmarks. However, they often lack the ability to conduct the strategic and empathetic consultation, which is essential for real-world clinical scenarios. To address this gap, we propose Doctor-R1, an AI doctor agent trained to master both of the capabilities by ask high-yield questions and conduct strategic multi-turn inquiry to guide decision-making.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Foundation models are reshaping EEG analysis, yet an important problem of EEG tokenization remains a challenge. This paper presents TFM-Tokenizer, a novel tokenization framework that learns a vocabulary of time-frequency motifs from *single-channel* EEG signals and encodes them into discrete tokens. We propose a dual-path architecture with time–frequency masking to capture robust motif representations, and it is model-agnostic, supporting both lightweight transformers and existing foundation models for downstream tasks. Our study demonstrates three key benefits: *Accuracy:* Experiments on four diverse EEG benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance gains across both single- and multi-dataset pretraining settings, achieving up to $11\%$ improvement in Cohen’s Kappa over strong baselines. Code/project link: https://github.com/Jathurshan0330/TFM-Tokenizer

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Class-incremental learning (CIL) in medical image-guided diagnosis requires models to preserve knowledge of historical disease classes while adapting to emerging categories. Pre-trained models (PTMs) with well-generalized features provide a strong foundation, yet most PTM-based CIL strategies, such as prompt tuning, task-specific adapters and model mixtures, rely on increasingly complex designs. While effective in general-domain benchmarks, these methods falter in medical imaging, where low intra-class variability and high inter-domain shifts (from scanners, protocols and institutions) make CIL particularly prone to representation collapse and domain misalignment. Under such conditions, we find that lightweight representation calibration strategies, often dismissed in general-domain CIL for their modest gains, can be remarkably effective for adapting PTMs in medical settings.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Segmentation in pathology image requires handling out-of-domain tissue morphologies and new pathologies beyond training distributions, where traditional closed-set segmentation approaches fail to generalize. Reasoning segmentation enables zero-shot generalization via prompting with text queries. However, existing reasoning segmentation models face three barriers when applied to pathology: (1) the vision encoder lack pathology-specific knowledge and robustness to staining variations, (2) the large language model (LLM) backbone for reasoning fails to identify whether it has gathered sufficient semantic context to trigger the segmentation output, and (3) no reasoning segmentation benchmarks and datasets exist for pathology analysis. Consequently, we introduce PathChat-SegR1, a reasoning segmentation model built upon pathology-specific vision encoders trained with a novel stain-invariant self-distillation for robust pathology image representations.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Popular explanation methods often produce unreliable feature importance scores due to missingness bias, a systematic distortion that arises when models are probed with ablated, out-of-distribution inputs. Existing solutions treat this as a deep representational flaw that requires expensive retraining or architectural modifications. In this work, we challenge this assumption and show that missingness bias can be effectively treated as a superficial artifact of the model's output space. We introduce MCal, a lightweight post-hoc method that corrects this bias by fine-tuning a simple linear head on the outputs of a frozen base model.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Learning to Defer (L2D) improves AI reliability in decision-critical environments by training AI to either make its own prediction or defer the decision to a human expert. A key challenge is adapting to unseen experts at test time, whose competence can differ from the training population. Current methods for this task, however, can falter when unseen experts are out-of-distribution (OOD) relative to the training population. We identify a core architectural flaw as the cause: they learn identity-conditioned policies by processing class-indexed signals in fixed coordinates, creating shortcuts that violate the problem's inherent permutation symmetry.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Healthcare data, such as Intensive Care Unit (ICU) records, comprise heterogeneous multivariate time series sampled at irregular intervals with pervasive missingness. However, clinical applications demand predictive models that are both accurate and interpretable. We present our Graph Attention-based Relational Learning for Intensive Care (GARLIC) model, a novel neural network architecture that imputes missing data through a learnable exponential-decay encoder, captures inter-sensor dependencies via time-lagged summary graphs, and fuses global patterns with cross-dimensional sequential attention. All attention weights and graph edges are learned end-to-end to serve as built-in observation-, signal-, and edge-level explanations.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Despite the impressive performance of LLM-powered agents, their adoption for Electronic Health Record (EHR) data access remains limited by the absence of benchmarks that adequately capture real-world clinical data access flows. In practice, two core challenges hinder deployment: query ambiguity from vague user questions and value mismatch between user terminology and database entries. To address this, we introduce EHR-ChatQA, an interactive database question answering benchmark that evaluates the end-to-end workflow of database agents: clarifying user questions, using tools to resolve value mismatches, and generating correct SQL to deliver accurate answers. To cover diverse patterns of query ambiguity and value mismatch, EHR-ChatQA assesses agents in a simulated environment with an LLM-based user across two interaction flows: Incremental Query Refinement (IncreQA), where users add constraints to existing queries, and Adaptive Query Refinement (AdaptQA), where users adjust their search goals mid-conversation. Code/project link: https://github.com/glee4810/EHR-ChatQA

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The integration of histology images and gene profiles has shown great promise for improving survival prediction in cancer. However, current approaches often struggle to model intra- and inter-modal interactions efficiently and effectively due to the high dimensionality and complexity of the inputs. A major challenge is capturing critical prognostic events that, though few, underlie the complexity of the observed inputs and largely determine patient outcomes. These events---manifested as high-level structural signals such as spatial histologic patterns or pathway co-activations---are typically sparse, patient-specific, and unannotated, making them inherently difficult to uncover.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Medical time series (MedTS) classification suffers from poor generalizability in real-world deployment due to inter- and intra-dataset heterogeneity, such as varying numbers of channels, signal lengths, task definitions, and patient characteristics. % implicit patient characteristics, variable channel configurations, time series lengths, and diagnostic tasks. To address this, we propose FORMED, a novel framework for repurposing a backbone foundation model, pre-trained on generic time series, to enable highly generalizable MedTS classification on unseen datasets. FORMED combines the backbone with a novel classifier comprising two components: (1) task-specific channel embeddings and label queries, dynamically sized to match any number of channels and target classes, and (2) a shared decoding attention layer, jointly trained across datasets to capture medical domain knowledge through task-agnostic feature-query interactions.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Conventional multi-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) systems capture cardiac signals from a fixed set of anatomical viewpoints defined by lead placement. However, cer- tain cardiac conditions (e.g., Brugada syndrome) require additional, non-standard viewpoints to reveal diagnostically critical patterns that may be absent in standard leads. To systematically overcome this limitation, Nef-Net was recently introduced to reconstruct a continuous electrocardiac field, enabling virtual observation of ECG signals from arbitrary views (termed Electrocardio Panorama). Despite its promise, Nef-Net operates under idealized assumptions and faces in-the-wild challenges, such as long-duration ECG modeling, robustness to device-specific signal artifacts, and suboptimal lead placement calibration. Code/project link: https://github.com/HKUSTGZ-ML4Health-Lab/NEFNET-v2

ICLR 2026 Oral accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Medical question answering (QA) benchmarks often focus on multiple-choice or fact-based tasks, leaving open-ended answers to real patient questions underexplored. This gap is particularly critical in mental health, where patient questions often mix symptoms, treatment concerns, and emotional needs, requiring answers that balance clinical caution with contextual sensitivity. We present CounselBench, a large-scale benchmark developed with 100 mental health professionals to evaluate and stress-test large language models (LLMs) in realistic help-seeking scenarios. The first component, CounselBench-EVAL, contains 2,000 expert evaluations of answers from GPT-4, LLaMA 3, Gemini, and online human therapists on patient questions from the public forum CounselChat.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Interpreting clinical electroencephalography (EEG) is a laborious, subjective process, and existing computational models are limited to narrow classification tasks rather than holistic interpretation. A key bottleneck for applying powerful Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to this domain is the scarcity of datasets pairing EEG visualizations with fine-grained, expert-level annotations. We address this by introducing CerebraGloss, an instruction-tuned LVLM for nuanced EEG interpretation. We first introduce a novel, automated data generation pipeline, featuring a bespoke YOLO-based waveform detector, to programmatically create a large-scale corpus of EEG-text instruction data. Code/project link: https://github.com/iewug/CerebraGloss

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Forecasting how 3D medical scans evolve along time is important for disease progression, treatment planning, and developmental assessment. Yet existing models either rely on a single prior scan, fixed grid times, or target global labels, which limits voxel-level forecasting under irregular sampling. We present CRONOS, a unified framework for many-to-one prediction from multiple past scans that supports both discrete (grid-based) and continuous (real-valued) timestamps in one model, to the best of our knowledge the first to achieve continuous sequence-to-image forecasting for 3D medical data. CRONOS learns a spatio-temporal velocity field that transports context volumes toward a target volume at an arbitrary time, while operating directly in 3D voxel space.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The application of large language models (LLMs) in the medical field has garnered significant attention, yet their reasoning capabilities in more specialized domains like anesthesiology remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce AnesSuite, the first comprehensive dataset suite specifically designed for anesthesiology reasoning in LLMs. The suite features AnesBench, an evaluation benchmark tailored to assess anesthesiology-related reasoning across three levels: factual retrieval (System 1), hybrid reasoning (System 1.x), and complex decision-making (System 2). Alongside this benchmark, the suite includes three training datasets that provide an infrastructure for continued pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Code/project link: https://github.com/MiliLab/AnesSuite

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Deep learning-based respiratory auscultation is currently hindered by two fundamental challenges: (i) inherent information loss, as converting signals into spectrograms discards transient acoustic events and clinical context; (ii) limited data availability, exacerbated by severe class imbalance. To bridge these gaps, we present **_Resp-Agent_**, an autonomous multimodal system orchestrated by a novel Active Adversarial Curriculum Agent (Thinker-A²CA). Unlike static pipelines, Thinker-A²CA serves as a central controller that actively identifies diagnostic weaknesses and schedules targeted synthesis in a closed loop. To address the representation gap, we introduce a modality-weaving Diagnoser that weaves clinical text with audio tokens via strategic global attention and sparse audio anchors, capturing both long-range clinical context and millisecond-level transients. Code/project link: https://github.com/zpforlove/Resp-Agent

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold immense promise for complex clinical tasks, but their reasoning capabilities are often constrained by text-only paradigms that fail to ground inferences in visual evidence. This limitation not only curtails performance on tasks requiring fine-grained visual analysis but also introduces risks of visual hallucination in safety-critical applications. Thus, we introduce MedVR, a novel reinforcement learning framework that enables annotation-free visual reasoning for medical VLMs. Its core innovation lies in two synergistic mechanisms: Entropy-guided Visual Regrounding (EVR) uses model uncertainty to direct exploration, while Consensus-based Credit Assignment (CCA) distills pseudo-supervision from rollout agreement.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The reliability of medical LLM evaluation is critically undermined by data contamination and knowledge obsolescence, leading to inflated scores on static benchmarks. To address these challenges, we introduce LiveClin, a live benchmark designed for the approximating real-world clinical practice. Built from contemporary, peer-reviewed case reports and updated biannually, LiveClin ensures clinical currency and resists data contamination. Using a verified AI–human workflow involving 239 physicians, we transform authentic patient cases into complex, multimodal evaluation scenarios that span the entire clinical pathway. Code/project link: https://github.com/AQ-MedAI/LiveClin

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Federated learning (FL) is increasingly adopted in domains like healthcare, where data privacy is paramount. A fundamental challenge in these systems is statistical heterogeneity—the fact that data distributions vary significantly across clients (e.g., different hospitals may treat distinct patient demographics). While current FL algorithms focus on aggregating model updates from these heterogeneous clients, the potential of the central server remains under-explored. This paper is motivated by a healthcare scenario: could a central server not only coordinate model training but also guide a new patient to the hospital best equipped for their specific condition?

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is a long-standing diagnostic tool. Yet machine learning for ECG interpretation remains fragmented, often limited to narrow tasks or datasets. FMs promise broader adaptability, but fundamental questions remain: Which architectures generalize best? How do models scale with limited labels? What explains performance differences across model families? We benchmarked eight ECG FMs on 26 clinically relevant tasks using 12 public datasets comprising 1,650 regression and classification targets. Models were evaluated under fine-tuning and frozen settings, with scaling analyses across dataset sizes.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly capable of answering medical questions that require joint reasoning over images and text, yet training general medical VQA systems is impeded by the lack of large, openly usable, high-quality corpora. We present MedVLSynther, a rubric-guided generator-verifier framework that synthesizes high-quality multiple-choice VQA items directly from open biomedical literature by conditioning on figures, captions, and in-text references. The generator produces self-contained stems and parallel, mutually exclusive options under a machine-checkable JSON schema; a multi-stage verifier enforces essential gates (self-containment, single correct answer, clinical validity, image-text consistency), awards fine-grained positive points, and penalizes common failure modes before acceptance. Applying this pipeline to PubMed Central yields MedSynVQA: 13,087 audited questions over 14,803 images spanning 13 imaging modalities and 28 anatomical regions.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has proven effective in enhancing large language models by encouraging step-by-step intermediate reasoning, and recent advances have extended this paradigm to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In the medical domain, where diagnostic decisions depend on nuanced visual cues and sequential reasoning, CoT aligns naturally with clinical thinking processes. However, current benchmarks for medical image understanding generally focus on the final answer while ignoring the reasoning path. An opaque process lacks reliable bases for judgment, making it difficult to assist doctors in diagnosis.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. In clinical practice, physicians refrain from making decisions when patient information is insufficient. This behavior, known as abstention, is a critical safety mechanism preventing potentially harmful misdiagnoses. Recent investigations have reported the application of large language models (LLMs) in medical scenarios. However, existing LLMs struggle with the abstentions, frequently providing overconfident responses despite incomplete information. This limitation stems from conventional abstention methods relying solely on model self-assessments, which lack systematic strategies to identify knowledge boundaries with external medical evidences.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Large visual language models (VLMs) have shown strong multi-modal medical reasoning ability, but most operate as end-to-end black boxes, diverging from clinicians’ evidence-based, staged workflows and hindering clinical accountability. Complementarily, expert visual grounding models can accurately localize regions of interest (ROIs), providing explicit, reliable evidence that improves both reasoning accuracy and trust. In this paper, we introduce **CARE**, advancing **C**linical **A**ccountability in multi-modal medical **R**easoning with an **E**vidence-grounded agentic framework. Unlike existing approaches that couple grounding and reasoning within a single generalist model, CARE decomposes the task into coordinated sub-modules to reduce shortcut learning and hallucination: a compact VLM proposes relevant medical entities; an expert entity-referring segmentation model produces pixel-level ROI evidence; and a grounded VLM reasons over the full image augmented by ROI hints.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Accurate prediction of the need for invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) in intensive care units (ICUs) patients is crucial for timely interventions and resource allocation. However, variability in patient populations, clinical practices, and electronic health record (EHR) systems across institutions introduces domain shifts that degrade the generalization performance of predictive models during deployment. Test-Time Training (TTT) has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate such shifts by adapting models dynamically during inference without requiring labeled target-domain data. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Test-Time Training (AdaTTT), an enhanced TTT framework tailored for EHR-based IMV prediction in ICU settings.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity through the random denoising process. In this work, we propose treating disease dynamics as a velocity field and leveraging Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, our approach captures the intrinsic dynamics of disease, making progression more interpretable.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. While LLMs have demonstrated medical knowledge and conversational ability, their deployment in clinical practice raises new risks: patients may place greater trust in LLM-generated responses than in nurses' professional judgments, potentially intensifying nurse–patient conflicts. Such risks highlight the urgent need of evaluating whether LLMs align with the core nursing values upheld by human nurses. This work introduces the first benchmark for nursing value alignment, consisting of five core value dimensions distilled from international nursing codes: _Altruism_, _Human Dignity_, _Integrity_, _Justice_, and _Professionalism_. We define two-level tasks on the benchmark, considering the two characteristics of emerging nurse–patient conflicts.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. The growing demand for prenatal ultrasound imaging has intensified a global shortage of trained sonographers, creating barriers to essential fetal health monitoring. Deep learning has the potential to enhance sonographers' efficiency and support the training of new practitioners. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are particularly promising for ultrasound interpretation, as they can jointly process images and text to perform multiple clinical tasks within a single framework. However, despite the expansion of VLMs, no standardized benchmark exists to evaluate their performance in fetal ultrasound imaging. Code/project link: https://github.com/BioMedIA-MBZUAI/FETAL-GAUGE

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Large language models perform well on many medical QA benchmarks, but real clinical reasoning is harder because diagnosis often requires integrating evidence across multiple images rather than interpreting a single view. We introduce MedThinkVQA, an expert-annotated benchmark for thinking with multiple images, in which models must interpret each image, combine cross-view evidence, and solve diagnostic questions under intermediate supervision and step-level evaluation. The dataset contains 10,067 cases, including 720 test cases, with an average of 6.68 images per case, substantially denser than prior work (earlier maxima $\leq$ 1.43). On the test set, the best closed-source models, Claude-4.6-opus, Gemini-3-pro, and GPT-5.2-xhigh, achieve only 54.9%--57.2% accuracy, while smaller proprietary variants, GPT-5-mini/nano, drop to 39.7% and 30.8%.

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.

ICLR 2026 Oral accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Accurate analysis of Medical time series (MedTS) data, such as Electroencephalography (EEG) and Electrocardiography (ECG), plays a pivotal role in healthcare applications, including the diagnosis of brain and heart diseases. MedTS data typically exhibits two critical patterns: **temporal dependencies** within individual channels and **channel dependencies** across multiple channels. While recent advances in deep learning have leveraged Transformer-based models to effectively capture temporal dependencies, they often struggle to model channel dependencies. This limitation stems from a structural mismatch: ***MedTS signals are inherently centralized, whereas the Transformer's attention is decentralized***, making it less effective at capturing global synchronization and unified waveform patterns. Code/project link: https://github.com/Levi-Ackman/TeCh

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Cancer patients are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) for medical information, making it critical to assess how well these models handle complex, personalized questions. However, current medical benchmarks focus on medical exams or consumer-searched questions and do not evaluate LLMs on real patient questions with patient details. In this paper, we first have three hematology-oncology physicians evaluate cancer-related questions drawn from real patients. While LLM responses are generally accurate, the models frequently fail to recognize or address false presuppositions} in the questions, posing risks to safe medical decision-making.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on standard medical benchmarks, yet their true clinical reasoning ability remains unclear. Existing datasets predominantly emphasize classification accuracy, creating an evaluation illusion in which models appear proficient while still failing at high-stakes diagnostic reasoning. We introduce Neural-MedBench, a compact yet reasoning-intensive benchmark specifically designed to probe the limits of multimodal clinical reasoning in neurology. Neural-MedBench integrates multi-sequence MRI scans, structured electronic health records, and clinical notes, and encompasses three core task families: differential diagnosis, lesion recognition, and rationale generation. Code/project link: https://neuromedbench.github.io/

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Epilepsy affects over 50 million people worldwide, and one-third of patients suffer drug-resistant seizures where surgery offers the best chance of seizure freedom. Accurate localization of the epileptogenic zone (EZ) relies on intracranial EEG (iEEG). Clinical workflows, however, remain constrained by labor-intensive manual review. At the same time, existing data-driven approaches are typically developed on single-center datasets that are inconsistent in format and metadata, lack standardized benchmarks, and rarely release pathological event annotations, creating barriers to reproducibility, cross-center validation, and clinical relevance. Code/project link: https://omni-ieeg.github.io/omni-ieeg/; https://github.com/Omni-iEEG/Omni-iEEG

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Current medical language model (LM) benchmarks often over-simplify the complexities of day-to-day clinical practice tasks and instead rely on evaluating LMs on multiple-choice board exam questions. In psychiatry especially, these challenges are worsened by fairness and bias issues, since models can be swayed by patient demographics even when those factors should not influence clinical decisions. Thus, we present an expert-created and annotated dataset spanning five critical domains of decision-making in mental healthcare: treatment, diagnosis, documentation, monitoring, and triage. This U.S. centric dataset — created without any LM assistance — is designed to capture the nuanced clinical reasoning and daily ambiguities mental health practitioners encounter, reflecting the inherent complexities of care delivery that are missing from existing datasets.

ICLR 2026 Poster accepted paper at ICLR 2026. Body composition analysis through CT and MRI imaging provides critical insights for cardio-metabolic health assessment but remains limited by accessibility barriers including radiation exposure, high costs, and infrastructure requirements. We present AbdCTBench, a large-scale dataset containing 23,506 CT-derived abdominal surface meshes from 18,719 patients, paired with 87 comorbidity labels, 31 specific diagnosis codes, and 16 CT-derived biomarkers. Our key insight is that external surface geometry is predictive of internal tissue composition, enabling accessible health screening through consumer devices. We establish comprehensive benchmarks across seven computer vision architectures (ResNet-18/34/50, DenseNet-121, EfficientNet-B0, ViT-Small, Swin Transformer-Base), demonstrating that models can learn robust surface-to-biomarker representations directly from 2D mesh projections. Code/project link: https://abdctbenchrepo.github.io/AbdCTBench/