Ruibo Hou

Yunpu Zhao, Rui Zhang, Junbin Xiao et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown significant capability in vision-language understanding. However, one critical issue that persists in these models is sycophancy, where models are unduly influenced by leading or deceptive prompts, resulting in biased outputs and hallucinations. Despite the rapid development of LVLMs, evaluating and mitigating sycophancy remains largely under-explored. In this work, we fill this gap by systematically analyzing sycophancy across multiple vision-language benchmarks and propose an inference-time mitigation framework. We curate leading queries and quantify the susceptibility of state-of-the-art LVLMs to prompt-induced bias, revealing consistent performance degradation and instability across models and tasks. Our analysis further uncovers model-specific behavioral traits, such as sentiment sensitivity and prediction polarity shifts under sycophancy. To mitigate these issues, we propose a training-free, model-agnostic framework that operates entirely at inference time. Our approach first employs a query neutralizer, leveraging an language model to suppress implicit sycophantic bias in user queries. We then introduce a sycophancy-aware contrastive decoding mechanism that dynamically recalibrates token-level output distributions by contrasting responses to neutralized and leading queries. Finally, an adaptive logits refinement module further modifies the contrasted logits by integrating both a adaptive plausibility filter and query sentiment scaler, ensuring coherent and robust generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this framework effectively mitigates sycophancy across all evaluated models, while maintaining performance on neutral prompts. Our results suggest that sycophancy in LVLMs is a general and urgent challenge, and that inference-time strategies offer a promising path toward trustworthy multimodal reasoning.

Shiyu Teng, Jiaqing Liu, Hao Sun et al.

Depression remains widely underdiagnosed and undertreated because stigma and subjective symptom ratings hinder reliable screening. To address this challenge, we propose a coarse-to-fine, multi-stage framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for accurate and interpretable detection. The pipeline performs binary screening, five-class severity classification, and continuous regression. At each stage, an LLM produces progressively richer clinical summaries that guide a multimodal fusion module integrating text, audio, and video features, yielding predictions with transparent rationale. The system then consolidates all summaries into a concise, human-readable assessment report. Experiments on the E-DAIC and CMDC datasets show significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and interpretability.

Shurong Chai, Rahul Kumar JAIN, Rui Xu et al.

Deep learning relies heavily on data augmentation to mitigate limited data, especially in medical imaging. Recent multimodal learning integrates text and images for segmentation, known as referring or text-guided image segmentation. However, common augmentations like rotation and flipping disrupt spatial alignment between image and text, weakening performance. To address this, we propose an early fusion framework that combines text and visual features before augmentation, preserving spatial consistency. We also design a lightweight generator that projects text embeddings into visual space, bridging semantic gaps. Visualization of generated pseudo-images shows accurate region localization. Our method is evaluated on three medical imaging tasks and four segmentation frameworks, achieving state-of-the-art results. Code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/11yxk/MedSeg_EarlyFusion.

Xiaoyu Shi, Rahul Kumar Jain, Yinhao Li et al.

Deep learning has demonstrated remarkable success in medical image segmentation and computer-aided diagnosis. In particular, numerous advanced methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in brain tumor segmentation from MRI scans. While recent studies in other medical imaging domains have revealed that integrating textual reports with visual data can enhance segmentation accuracy, the field of brain tumor analysis lacks a comprehensive dataset that combines radiological images with corresponding textual annotations. This limitation has hindered the exploration of multimodal approaches that leverage both imaging and textual data. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce the TextBraTS dataset, the first publicly available volume-level multimodal dataset that contains paired MRI volumes and rich textual annotations, derived from the widely adopted BraTS2020 benchmark. Building upon this novel dataset, we propose a novel baseline framework and sequential cross-attention method for text-guided volumetric medical image segmentation. Through extensive experiments with various text-image fusion strategies and templated text formulations, our approach demonstrates significant improvements in brain tumor segmentation accuracy, offering valuable insights into effective multimodal integration techniques. Our dataset, implementation code, and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Jupitern52/TextBraTS.

Shiyu Teng, Haichen Yu, Jiaqing Liu et al.

Multimodal behavioral analysis offers a scalable approach to assessing depression, anxiety, and stress, yet generic fusion models often ignore the psychometric structure of questionnaire labels. In DASS-21, risk labels are derived from ordered symptom items through fixed item-to-subscale mappings. We propose \textbf{DynaBridge}, a dynamic summary-guided cross-task multimodal framework for DASS-structured mental health assessment. DynaBridge encodes acoustic, visual, and textual cues across multiple sessions and augments them with frozen-LLM-generated DASS-aware summaries as participant-level semantic evidence. It predicts ordinal item distributions, reconstructs depression, anxiety, and stress risk evidence from item-level soft scores, and fuses this evidence with direct multimodal risk predictions. A confidence-aware refinement strategy further incorporates high-confidence semantic cues conservatively. On the official AdoDAS validation split, DynaBridge outperforms the official baseline and representative multimodal methods, achieving 0.5012 mean F1 for D/A/S risk prediction and 0.3216 mean QWK for DASS-21 item prediction. These results show the value of bridging multimodal cues, semantic summaries, and DASS-21 psychometric structure.

Shiyu Teng, Jiaqing Liu, Rahul Kumar Jain et al.

Depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, posing a severe burden on individuals, healthcare systems, and society at large. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in addressing mental health challenges, including the detection of depression through text-based analysis. However, current LLM-based methods often struggle with nuanced symptom identification and lack a transparent, step-by-step reasoning process, making it difficult to accurately classify and explain mental health conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a Chain-of-Thought Prompting approach that enhances both the performance and interpretability of LLM-based depression detection. Our method breaks down the detection process into four stages: (1) sentiment analysis, (2) binary depression classification, (3) identification of underlying causes, and (4) assessment of severity. By guiding the model through these structured reasoning steps, we improve interpretability and reduce the risk of overlooking subtle clinical indicators. We validate our method on the E-DAIC dataset, where we test multiple state-of-the-art large language models. Experimental results indicate that our Chain-of-Thought Prompting technique yields superior performance in both classification accuracy and the granularity of diagnostic insights, compared to baseline approaches.

Peng Xia, Ze Chen, Juanxi Tian et al.

Artificial intelligence has significantly impacted medical applications, particularly with the advent of Medical Large Vision Language Models (Med-LVLMs), sparking optimism for the future of automated and personalized healthcare. However, the trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs remains unverified, posing significant risks for future model deployment. In this paper, we introduce CARES and aim to comprehensively evaluate the Trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs across the medical domain. We assess the trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs across five dimensions, including trustfulness, fairness, safety, privacy, and robustness. CARES comprises about 41K question-answer pairs in both closed and open-ended formats, covering 16 medical image modalities and 27 anatomical regions. Our analysis reveals that the models consistently exhibit concerns regarding trustworthiness, often displaying factual inaccuracies and failing to maintain fairness across different demographic groups. Furthermore, they are vulnerable to attacks and demonstrate a lack of privacy awareness. We publicly release our benchmark and code in https://cares-ai.github.io/.