English

Dynamic Decision Learning: Test-Time Evolution for Abnormality Grounding in Rare Diseases

Computation and Language 2026-04-29 v1

Abstract

Clinical abnormality grounding for rare diseases is often hindered by data scarcity, making supervised fine-tuning impractical and single-pass inference highly unstable. We propose Dynamic Decision Learning (DDL), a framework that enables frozen large vision-language models (LVLMs) to refine their decisions across both language and visual spaces by optimizing instructions and consolidating predictions under visual perturbations. This process improves localization quality and produces a consensus-based reliability score that quantifies model confidence. Results on brain imaging benchmarks, including a rare-disease dataset with 281 pathology types across models ranging from 3B to 72B parameters, show that DDL improves mAP@75 by up to 105% on rare-disease cases and outperforms adaptation baselines and supervised fine-tuning. Furthermore, DDL demonstrates stronger calibration between reliability scores and localization accuracy under severe distribution shifts and increasing task difficulty. Code is available at: https://lijunrio.github.io/DDL/

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.24972,
  title  = {Dynamic Decision Learning: Test-Time Evolution for Abnormality Grounding in Rare Diseases},
  author = {Jun Li and Mingxuan Liu and Jiazhen Pan and Che Liu and Wenjia Bai and Cosmin I. Bercea and Julia A. Schnabel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24972},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:38:06.106Z