Ushashi Bhattacharjee

Shreyan Ganguly, Angona Biswas, Jaydeep Rade et al.

Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) excel on natural images, but their utility for biomedical microscopy remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how in-context learning enables state-of-the-art VLMs to perform few-shot object detection when large annotated datasets are unavailable, as is often the case with microscopic images. We introduce the Micro-OD benchmark, a curated collection of 252 images specifically curated for in-context learning, with bounding-box annotations spanning 11 cell types across four sources, including two in-lab expert-annotated sets. We systematically evaluate eight VLMs under few-shot conditions and compare variants with and without implicit test-time reasoning tokens. We further implement a hybrid Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) pipeline that combines a detection head with a VLM-based few-shot classifier, which enhances the few-shot performance of recent VLMs on our benchmark. Across datasets, we observe that zero-shot performance is weak due to the domain gap; however, few-shot support consistently improves detection, with marginal gains achieved after six shots. We observe that models with reasoning tokens are more effective for end-to-end localization, whereas simpler variants are more suitable for classifying pre-localized crops. Our results highlight in-context adaptation as a practical path for microscopy, and our benchmark provides a reproducible testbed for advancing open-vocabulary detection in biomedical imaging.

Zainab Ghafoor, Md Shafiqul Islam, Koushik Howlader et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in healthcare, yet ensuring their ethical integrity and safety compliance remains a major barrier to clinical deployment. This work introduces a multi-agent refinement framework designed to enhance the safety and reliability of medical LLMs through structured, iterative alignment. Our system combines two generative models - DeepSeek R1 and Med-PaLM - with two evaluation agents, LLaMA 3.1 and Phi-4, which assess responses using the American Medical Association's (AMA) Principles of Medical Ethics and a five-tier Safety Risk Assessment (SRA-5) protocol. We evaluate performance across 900 clinically diverse queries spanning nine ethical domains, measuring convergence efficiency, ethical violation reduction, and domain-specific risk behavior. Results demonstrate that DeepSeek R1 achieves faster convergence (mean 2.34 vs. 2.67 iterations), while Med-PaLM shows superior handling of privacy-sensitive scenarios. The iterative multi-agent loop achieved an 89% reduction in ethical violations and a 92% risk downgrade rate, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach. This study presents a scalable, regulator-aligned, and cost-efficient paradigm for governing medical AI safety.