Jianwei Yin
Publications
VITAL: Visual-Semantic Dual Supervision for Enhanced and Interpretable Latent Reasoning in Medical MLLMs
Latent reasoning enables reasoning over continuous hidden states rather than explicit tokens, avoiding the language bottleneck and inference overhead of chain-of-thought for medical VQA. However, existing methods suffer from modality collapse, insufficient visual supervision, and train-inference mismatch. Moreover, their opaque latent states offer no interpretability, which is critical in clinical applications. We propose VITAL, a latent-space reasoning framework for medical MLLMs with visual-semantic dual supervision: an auxiliary text decoder reconstructs reasoning chains from latent states, while a visual projector regresses ROI features from a frozen, independent medical vision encoder. Both modules are discarded at inference with zero overhead, yet can be re-attached post-hoc for dual interpretability, providing textual and visual explanations of the reasoning process without sacrificing efficiency. We construct a 61K dataset spanning 9 imaging modalities, exceeding prior medical visual latent reasoning datasets by an order of magnitude. Experiments on 7 benchmarks show that VITAL consistently and substantially outperforms the backbone, all latent reasoning baselines, and medical MLLMs trained on far larger data, achieving state-of-the-art results competitive with trillion-parameter proprietary models.
Talking to Yourself: Defying Forgetting in Large Language Models
Catastrophic forgetting remains a major challenge when fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrow, task-specific data, often degrading their general knowledge and reasoning abilities. We propose SA-SFT, a lightweight self-augmentation routine in which an LLM generates self-dialogues prior to fine-tuning, and the resulting self-authored data are mixed with task data without modifying optimization or training schedules. Despite requiring no external data or additional tuning, SA-SFT consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting while improving in-domain performance. Across 50 evaluation scenarios, it maintains performance comparable to the original model and achieves the best results in 40 cases, outperforming common baselines such as layer freezing and external data mixing. Guided by these empirical findings, we further present a theoretical analysis suggesting that forgetting can partly stem from style-induced parameter drift, and that self-alignment through self-generated data provides an effective means to counteract this effect. Overall, our results indicate that self-augmentation offers a simple and effective mechanism for robust LLM adaptation without incurring catastrophic forgetting.