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Synergizing Discriminative Exemplars and Self-Refined Experience for MLLM-based In-Context Learning in Medical Diagnosis

About

General Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often underperform in capturing domain-specific nuances in medical diagnosis, trailing behind fully supervised baselines. Although fine-tuning provides a remedy, the high costs of expert annotation and massive computational overhead limit its scalability. To bridge this gap without updating the weights of the pre-trained backbone of the MLLM, we propose a Clinician Mimetic Workflow. This is a novel In-Context Learning (ICL) framework designed to synergize Discriminative Exemplar Coreset Selection (DECS) and Self-Refined Experience Summarization (SRES). Specifically, DECS simulates a clinician's ability to reference "anchor cases" by selecting discriminative visual coresets from noisy data at the computational level; meanwhile, SRES mimics the cognition and reflection in clinical diagnosis by distilling diverse rollouts into a dynamic textual Experience Bank. Extensive evaluation across all 12 datasets of the MedMNIST 2D benchmark demonstrates that our method outperforms zero-shot general and medical MLLMs. Simultaneously, it achieves performance levels comparable to fully supervised vision models and domain-specific fine-tuned MLLMs, setting a new benchmark for parameter-efficient medical in-context learning. Our code is available at an anonymous repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Synergizing-Discriminative-Exemplars-and-Self-Refined-Experience-ED74.

Wenkai Zhao, Zipei Wang, Mengjie Fang, Di Dong, Jie Tian, Lingwei Zhang• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Image ClassificationBreastMNIST
Accuracy90.5
64
Image ClassificationDermaMNIST
Accuracy83.6
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Image ClassificationPathMNIST
Accuracy95.4
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Medical Image ClassificationChestMNIST
Accuracy90.9
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Image ClassificationMedMNIST 2D OrganAMNIST
Accuracy96.2
20
Image ClassificationMedMNIST BloodMNIST 2D
Accuracy98.7
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Image ClassificationMedMNIST 2D OrganCMNIST
Accuracy94.4
12
Image ClassificationMedMNIST PneumoniaMNIST 2D
Accuracy92.7
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Image ClassificationMedMNIST 2D OCTMNIST
Accuracy84.8
12
Image ClassificationMedMNIST 2D RetinaMNIST
Accuracy57.5
11
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