Skip to content

DRRG: A Discrete Diffusion Framework for Radiology Report Generation

Aug 2026 · 0 citations · 48 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

Discrete diffusion provides an effective alternative to autoregressive radiology report generation by enabling iterative, bidirectional report refinement.

Abstract

Purpose: Automatic radiology report generation (RRG) has been widely explored to improve reporting accuracy and reduce radiologists'workload. Most existing methods rely on autoregressive (AR) frameworks that generate reports token by token and cannot revise earlier content, making them prone to error propagation and inconsistent with the iterative refinement process of radiological reporting. In contrast, discrete diffusion large language models (DLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, naturally enabling report refinement. However, DLLMs have not been extensively investigated for RRG. In this study, we developed and evaluated a discrete diffusion framework for RRG that enables iterative refinement rather than conventional left-to-right autoregressive decoding. Materials and methods: We developed DRRG, a DLLM-based framework that formulates RRG as iterative masked-token denoising. DRRG incorporates a clinical-entities-aware complementary mask to improve token supervision coverage and emphasize clinically important entities, together with a concept-conditioning module that injects image-derived clinical concepts into visual representations. DRRG was trained and evaluated on MIMIC-CXR and CheXpert Plus. Results: On MIMIC-CXR, DRRG achieved BLEU-4 of 0.210, CheXpert-F1 of 0.549, RadGraph-F1 of 0.281, GREEN of 0.360, and RaTEScore of 0.604, outperforming the compared methods on most reported metrics, despite employing a substantially smaller LLM decoder. On CheXpert Plus, DRRG achieved the highest BLEU-4 (0.119) and CheXpert-F1 (0.347) among the compared methods. Conclusion: Discrete diffusion provides an effective alternative to autoregressive radiology report generation by enabling iterative, bidirectional report refinement. Incorporating clinically focused masking and image-derived concept conditioning improves report quality and clinical consistency.

View source

Similar papers

#small language model Open access Aug 2026

LifeSciBench: Evaluating Language Models on Realistic, Expert-Level Tasks in the Life Sciences

LifeSciBench is introduced, a benchmark of 750 expert-authored tasks designed to evaluate whether language models can handle realistic life science research work, with each constituent task paired with a human expert-written rubric.

Amelia Liu, Andrew Ho, Anne Marie Droste et al. · 2 citations
#small language model Preprint Aug 2026

CritICL: Inference-Time Weak-to-Strong Generalization from Small Language Model Failure Modes

Experimental results show that CritICL consistently outperforms standard in-context learning and achieves performance competitive with or superior to test-time scaling methods, while requiring significantly fewer generations and lower token cost.

Yu-Fan Wu, Yinghui He, Zhengyi Hu et al. · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

TestifAI: Tomography-Based Testing for Deep Learning Systems

TestifAI, a deep learning testing framework for efficient and accurate estimation of robustness against combinations of perturbations, is proposed and partial model tomography is introduced, a novel approach to reconstructing model behaviour in a multi-perturbation space from tests that apply only a small number of perturbations.

Arooj Arif, T. Hartung, E. Botoeva et al. · 1 citation

Low Carbon Scheduling of Integrated Energy System Based on Large Language Model-Embedded Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

The complex multi-energy coupling characteristics inherent to integrated energy system (IES) present unprecedented challenges for the implementation of low-carbon scheduling. Existing optimization methods often exhibit limitations in system scalability, algorithm adaptivity, and carbon reduction efficacy for complex IES. This paper proposes a Large Language Model (LLM)-Embedded Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (LEMARL) to address the aforementioned issues. The proposed method integrates the global perception capability of LLMs with the dynamic optimization capability of MARL. Specifically, the LLM-Embedded module generates high-quality reward functions and policy frameworks from a global perspective, while the MARL module leverages these LLM-generated strategies for distributed interactive iterations—greatly enhancing computation efficiency and scalability. Simulation results demonstrate that LEMARL reduces carbon emissions by 7.76% and simultaneously decreases operating costs by 4.49% in a small-scale IES. Furthermore, LEMARL also exhibits superior applicability and scalability in large-scale IES of the IEEE 141-bus power grid integrated with 51-node thermal system.

Chen Xia, Tong Gou, Yinliang Xu et al. · 1 citation
#small language model Preprint Aug 2026

Apodex 1.1: Scaling Agentic Intelligence for Complex Work

General-purpose language models can reason and synthesize knowledge, but complex work also requires sustained interaction with files, information sources, and executable code, together with state maintenance, failure recovery, and verifiable delivery. We call this \emph{working capability}: sustained, verifiable progress toward a real-world objective. Apodex 1.1 develops this capability along two complementary dimensions. \emph{Environment Scaling} expands the diversity and verifiability of executable file, search, and code environments, while \emph{Agentic Coordination Scaling} trains agents to decompose long-horizon tasks, delegate parallel work, integrate asynchronous results, and replan. A shared execution harness and AgentOS maintain task state and provenance across tools and agents, and training turns environment trajectories and coordination traces into reliable behavior. Across complex professional work, finance, scientific research, mathematics, coding, and search, Apodex 1.1 reaches the leading performance band despite using a substantially smaller model than many frontier systems. The 35B-parameter Apodex 1.1 Mini further retains strong working capability in a locally deployable form. These results ground agentic intelligence in useful, verifiable work completed over time and advance our goal of building a \emph{Heavy-Duty Solver} for ambitious, long-running tasks.

Apodex Team B. An, B. Li, B. Wang et al. · 1 citation

Related blog posts