Multimodal Medical Image Parsing with Task-Specific Low-Rank Adapters

Abstract

Adapting a single vision-language model to medical image parsing requires training choices that reflect the demands of each task. We study task-specific adaptation with Qwen3.5-9B for FLARE 2026 Task 3, covering six task families and seven imaging modalities. Our system couples a shared, frozen 4-bit backbone with LoRA adapters selected from the input question. We customize adapter ranks and prompts, rebalance rare classification targets, and supplement regression training with dermatology classification examples. On the fixed internal holdout, the task-specific adapters achieve a dataset-macro balanced accuracy of 0.7791 for classification, a dataset-macro micro-F1 of 0.6286 for multi-label classification, a counting mean absolute error (MAE) of 11.73, a dataset-macro detection F1 of 0.8914, a dataset-macro regression MAE of 9.78, and a report-generation CRIMSON score of 0.8204. On the organizer's 1,703-example hidden-validation set, the submitted system achieves 0.8496 classification balanced accuracy, 0.5338 sample-averaged multi-label F1, and 14.5950 regression MAE. The final 30.1 GB container averages 3.1 seconds per case, including model loading, and produces identical outputs across repeated verification runs. The benefits vary across tasks, supporting the use of task-specific adapter configurations and image budgets within a shared medical vision-language model. Code is available at https://github.com/TahaSabir0/FLARE26-Hexapus.