LEAML: Label-Efficient Adaptation to Out-of-Distribution Visual Tasks
  for Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: name: Ci-Siang Lin; name: Min-Hung Chen; name: Yu-Yang Sheng; name: Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
Published: 2025-10-03 17:59:56

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on
general visual benchmarks but struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks in
specialized domains such as medical imaging, where labeled data is limited and
expensive. We introduce LEAML, a label-efficient adaptation framework that
leverages both scarce labeled VQA samples and abundant unlabeled images. Our
approach generates domain-relevant pseudo question-answer pairs for unlabeled
data using a QA generator regularized by caption distillation. Importantly, we
selectively update only those neurons most relevant to question-answering,
enabling the QA Generator to efficiently acquire domain-specific knowledge
during distillation. Experiments on gastrointestinal endoscopy and sports VQA
demonstrate that LEAML consistently outperforms standard fine-tuning under
minimal supervision, highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed LEAML
framework.