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Research paperMultimodal Models · Large Language Models · Applications2 sources · Oct 6, 2026

Frozen Models, Evolving Expertise: Model-Agnostic Learning from Deployment Experience for Multimodal Medical AI

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) are usually frozen after deployment, so they do not learn from the cases they solve.

Key points

  • This is especially concerning in medicine, where new clinical evidence, updated guidelines, and new therapies can change established practice.
  • Fine-tuning can update the model, but it requires access to model weights and additional training.
  • Parameter-free methods avoid training, but they may overfit a fixed validation set, lack reliable domain knowledge, or lose visual details by saving experience only as text.
  • Across six benchmarks covering clinical diagnosis, clinical workflows, medical reasoning, and medical and non-medical visual reasoning, and with four open-weight and closed-source base models, our framework improves performance during online deployment by up to 34.2% over the base model on medical tasks, generalizes to unseen cases, transfers to other models without further optimization, and works in non-medical domains.

Sources (2)

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