MedSynapse-V: Bridging Visual Perception and Clinical Intuition via Latent Memory Evolution

arXiv cs.AI / 4/30/2026

💬 OpinionIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper argues that current medical vision-language models (VLMs) suffer a cognitive misalignment due to discrete tokenization, which causes quantization loss, loss of long-range information, and failure to capture case-adaptive clinical intuition.
  • It introduces MedSynapse-V, a framework that evolves “latent diagnostic memory” inside the model’s hidden representations to better simulate how clinicians implicitly retrieve expertise during interpretation.
  • The method uses a Meta Query for Prior Memorization mechanism to retrieve structured anatomical priors and synthesize condensed implicit memories, then applies Causal Counterfactual Refinement (CCR) with reinforcement learning to prune redundant memories using region-level feature masking and counterfactual rewards.
  • The approach concludes with Intrinsic Memory Transition (IMT), a dual-branch scheme that aligns student-branch internal patterns with teacher-branch diagnostic logic via full-vocabulary divergence alignment.
  • Experiments across multiple datasets reportedly show improved diagnostic accuracy over prior state-of-the-art methods, including chain-of-thought-based approaches, by transferring external expertise into internal parameters.

Abstract

High-precision medical diagnosis relies not only on static imaging features but also on the implicit diagnostic memory experts instantly invoke during image interpretation. We pinpoint a fundamental cognitive misalignment in medical VLMs caused by discrete tokenization, leading to quantization loss, long-range information dissipation, and missing case-adaptive expertise. To bridge this gap, we propose ours, a framework for latent diagnostic memory evolution that simulates the experiential invocation of clinicians by dynamically synthesizing implicit diagnostic memories within the model's hidden stream. Specifically, it begins with a Meta Query for Prior Memorization mechanism, where learnable probes retrieve structured priors from an anatomical prior encoder to generate condensed implicit memories. To ensure clinical fidelity, we introduce Causal Counterfactual Refinement (CCR), which leverages reinforcement learning and counterfactual rewards derived from region-level feature masking to quantify the causal contribution of each memory, thereby pruning redundancies and aligning latent representations with diagnostic logic. This evolutionary process culminates in Intrinsic Memory Transition (IMT), a privileged-autonomous dual-branch paradigm that internalizes teacher-branch diagnostic patterns into the student-branch via full-vocabulary divergence alignment. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate that ours, by transferring external expertise into endogenous parameters, significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly chain-of-thought paradigms, in diagnostic accuracy.