Jie Cao
Publications
MedXIAOHE: A Comprehensive Recipe for Building Medical MLLMs
We present MedXIAOHE, a medical vision-language foundation model designed to advance general-purpose medical understanding and reasoning in real-world clinical applications. MedXIAOHE achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse medical benchmarks and surpasses leading closed-source multimodal systems on multiple capabilities. To achieve this, we propose an entity-aware continual pretraining framework that organizes heterogeneous medical corpora to broaden knowledge coverage and reduce long-tail gaps (e.g., rare diseases). For medical expert-level reasoning and interaction, MedXIAOHE incorporates diverse medical reasoning patterns via reinforcement learning and tool-augmented agentic training, enabling multi-step diagnostic reasoning with verifiable decision traces. To improve reliability in real-world use, MedXIAOHE integrates user-preference rubrics, evidence-grounded reasoning, and low-hallucination long-form report generation, with improved adherence to medical instructions. We release this report to document our practical design choices, scaling insights, and evaluation framework, hoping to inspire further research.
LLM-based Multimodal Feedback Produces Equivalent Learning and Better Student Perceptions than Educator Feedback
Providing timely, targeted, and multimodal feedback helps students quickly correct errors, build deep understanding and stay motivated, yet making it at scale remains a challenge. This study introduces a real-time AI-facilitated multimodal feedback system that integrates structured textual explanations with dynamic multimedia resources, including the retrieved most relevant slide page references and streaming AI audio narration. In an online crowdsourcing experiment, we compared this system against fixed business-as-usual feedback by educators across three dimensions: (1) learning effectiveness, (2) learner engagement, (3) perceived feedback quality and value. Results showed that AI multimodal feedback achieved learning gains equivalent to original educator feedback while significantly outperforming it on perceived clarity, specificity, conciseness, motivation, satisfaction, and reducing cognitive load, with comparable correctness, trust, and acceptance. Process logs revealed distinct engagement patterns: for multiple-choice questions, educator feedback encouraged more submissions; for open-ended questions, AI-facilitated targeted suggestions lowered revision barriers and promoted iterative improvement. These findings highlight the potential of AI multimodal feedback to provide scalable, real-time, and context-aware support that both reduces instructor workload and enhances student experience.