To advance biomedical vison-language model capabilities through scaling up, fine-tuning, and instruction tuning, develop vision-language models with improved performance in handling long text, explore strategies to efficiently adopt vision language models for diverse multi-modal biomedical tasks, and examine the zero-shot learning performance. We developed two biomedical vision language models, BiomedGPT-Large and BiomedGPT-XLarge, based on an encoder-decoder-based transformer architecture. We fine-tuned the two models on 23 benchmark datasets from 6 multi-modal biomedical tasks including one image-only task (image classification), three language-only tasks (text understanding, text summarization and question answering), and two vision-language tasks (visual question answering and image captioning). We compared the developed scaled models with our previous BiomedGPT-Base model and existing prestigious models reported in the literature. We instruction-tuned the two models using a large-scale multi-modal biomedical instruction-tuning dataset and assessed the zero-shot learning performance and alignment accuracy.
@article{arxiv.2505.17436,
title = {Scaling Up Biomedical Vision-Language Models: Fine-Tuning, Instruction Tuning, and Multi-Modal Learning},
author = {Cheng Peng and Kai Zhang and Mengxian Lyu and Hongfang Liu and Lichao Sun and Yonghui Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.17436},
year = {2025}
}