Title: Synthesizing High-Quality Visual Question Answering from Medical Documents with Generator-Verifier LMMs
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Medical VQA, Large Multimodal Models, Data Synthesis, Medical Literature, Vision-Language, Open-Weight Models

Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly capable of answering medical questions that require joint reasoning over images and text, yet training general medical VQA systems is impeded by the lack of large, openly usable, high-quality corpora. We present \textbf{MedVLSynther}, a rubric-guided generator-verifier framework that synthesizes high-quality multiple-choice VQA items directly from open biomedical literature by conditioning on figures, captions, and in-text references. The generator produces self-contained stems and parallel, mutually exclusive options under a machine-checkable JSON schema; a multi-stage verifier enforces essential gates (self-containment, single correct answer, clinical validity, image-text consistency), awards fine-grained positive points, and penalizes common failure modes before acceptance. Applying this pipeline to PubMed Central yields \textit{MedVLSynther-13K}: 13,087 audited questions over 14,803 images spanning 13 imaging modalities and 28 anatomical regions. Training open-weight LMMs with reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards improves accuracy across six medical VQA benchmarks, achieving averages of 55.85 (3B) and 57.56 (7B), with up to 77.21 on VQA-RAD and 66.36 on PathVQA, outperforming strong medical LMMs. Ablations verify that both generation and verification are necessary and that more verified data consistently helps, and a targeted contamination analysis detects no leakage from evaluation suites. By operating entirely on open literature and open-weight models, MedVLSynther offers an auditable, reproducible, and privacy-preserving path to scalable medical VQA training data.

TL;DR: We present MedVLSynther, a transparent, open-weight generator–verifier pipeline that synthesizes high-quality, context-aware medical VQA from the open subset of PubMed literature