用集合距离奖励提升胸部X光报告生成质量,效果优于传统方法。
SDR: Set-Distance Rewards for Radiology Report Generation

- 将报告拆成句子,用嵌入向量表示为无序集合,计算与标准报告的集合距离作为奖励。
- 在两个数据集上,相比监督微调和精确匹配奖励,指标平均提升6.8%~7.8%。
- 支持测试时高效筛选和中途剪枝,生成字数减少50%以上仍保持高质量。
基于可验证奖励的强化学习正快速推动视觉-语言模型的推理能力。然而,对于胸部X光报告生成,标准奖励(如精确匹配准确率和步骤级过程)不适用,因为报告由无序且独立的发现组成,而非因果推理链。本文提出从集合视角出发:将每份报告拆分为句子,并通过冻结的句子编码器生成嵌入向量,形成无序嵌入集合。提出使用生成报告与参考报告嵌入集合之间的集合到集合距离作为连续、置换不变的奖励信号。在两个数据集及三种视觉-语言模型(Qwen3-VL-2B/4B、Gemma3-4B)上,基于集合距离的GRPO后训练方法,在所有核心指标(BERTScore、RadGraph F1、CheXbert F1)上均显著优于监督微调和精确匹配的GRPO,平均提升分别为6.80%、7.82%和4.45%。相同集合距离还可用于测试时的best-of-N选择:以候选报告与训练报告嵌入的距离评分,优于随机选择,对训练模型及三款闭源大模型(Mistral-Small、Gemini-2.5 Flash-Lite、GPT-4o-mini)平均提升BERTScore 16.4%。作为流式信号,该方法支持更高效的测试时扩展:在生成过程中中段剪枝低分候选,可减少超过50%的生成词数,同时保持全best-of-N的质量。这些结果确立了集合距离奖励在胸部X光报告生成中的统一性,适用于后训练与测试时缩放。代码已公开。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has rapidly advanced reasoning in vision--language models. However, for chest X-ray report generation, the standard rewards (i.e. exact-match accuracy and step-level processes) are incompatible because the reports consist of unordered and orthogonal findings, rather than a causal reasoning chain. We address this gap with a set-based view: each report is split into sentences and embedded by a frozen sentence transformer, yielding unordered embedding sets. We propose the use of set-to-set distances between generated and reference embeddings as continuous, permutation-invariant rewards. Across two datasets and three vision--language models (Qwen3-VL-2B/4B, Gemma3-4B), post-training with set-to-set distance based rewards via GRPO consistently outperforms supervised fine-tuning and exact-match GRPO on all headline metrics (BERTScore, RadGraph F1 and CheXbert F1 by average \%6.80, \%7.82 and \%4.45 relative improvements respectively). The same set distances also enable test-time best-of-$N$ selection: scoring candidates by their distance to training-report embeddings outperforms random selection on our trained models as well as three closed-source LLMs (Mistral-Small, Gemini-2.5 Flash-Lite, GPT-4o-mini) with on average \%16.4 relative improvement on BERTScore. Used as a streaming signal, they support a more efficient form of test-time scaling: pruning low-scoring candidates mid-generation reduces generated tokens by over 50\% while preserving the Findings quality of full best-of-$N$ selection. Together these results establish set-distance rewards as a unified signal for both post-training and test-time scaling in chest X-ray report generation. Our code is publicly \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Set-Distance-Rewards-CXR-BFDA}{available}.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。