Introduction
Vision-language foundation models demonstrate strong performance in pattern recognition, but lack robust reasoning capabilities, limiting their application in specialized domains. Medical imaging highlights this critical limitation: diagnosis requires connecting visual findings with clinical knowledge through explicit reasoning processes. While foundation models excel at visual recognition, medical decision-making demands interpretable chain-of-thought diagnosis, multimodal grounding of visual features in clinical knowledge, comprehensive evaluation frameworks for reasoning quality, and probabilistic reasoning for clinical decisions. Given the rapid advancements in foundation models over the past three years, addressing these reasoning gaps has become essential for deploying AI systems in high-stakes healthcare applications where explainability and trustworthiness are paramount.
The CVPR 2026 Workshop on Medical Reasoning with Vision Language Foundation Models (Med-Reasoner) aims to bring together computer vision researchers, medical AI experts, imaging scientists, and practicing clinicians to discuss state-of-the-art advancements, applications, and challenges in reasoning capabilities for medical vision-language models. The workshop will foster discussions that inspire innovation in interpretable medical AI and address real-world deployment challenges including privacy constraints, workflow integration into healthcare systems, and ensuring fairness across patient populations. Through invited talks from leading researchers at Google DeepMind, Stanford, MIT, and University of Toronto, contributed paper presentations, interactive poster sessions, and expert panel discussions, we will establish reasoning architectures and evaluation frameworks that advance healthcare applications with the potential to impact millions of patients globally.
Invited Speakers
Hoifung Poon, PhD
Microsoft Research
Faisal Mahmood, PhD
Associate Professor
Harvard University
Tanishq Mathew Abraham, PhD
Founder & CEO, Sophont
Serena Yeung, PhD
Assistant Professor
Stanford University
Maria Xenochristou, PhD
Applied Scientist
Amazon Health Services
📑 Accepted Papers
| Poster Board ID | Format | Title | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|
| TBD | ORAL | To Agree or To Be Right? The Grounding-Sycophancy Tradeoff in Medical Vision-Language Models | OFM Riaz Rahman Aranya, Kevin Desai |
| TBD | ORAL | MOSAIC: Multimodal OA Staging with Adaptive Interpretable Clinical Constraints for Evidence-Grounded Knee MRI Grading | Basit Ali, Sheheryar Khan, Rizwan Qureshi, Muhammad Asim, Mehmood Nawaz, Basim Azam |
| TBD | ORAL | Guideline2Graph: Profile-Aware Multimodal Parsing for Executable Clinical Decision Graphs | Onur Selim Kilic, Yeti Z. Gurbuz, Cem Okan Yaldiz, Afra Nawar, Etrit Haxholli, Oğul Can, Eli Waxman |
| TBD | ORAL | Leveraging Image Editing Foundation Models for Data-Efficient CT Metal Artifact Reduction | Ahmet Rasim Emirdagi, Süleyman Aslan, Mısra Yavuz, Görkay Aydemir, Yunus Bilge Kurt, Nasrin Rahimi, Burak Can Biner, M. Akin Yilmaz |
| TBD | POSTER | BSMAD: Bridging Semantic and Structural Manifolds for Robust Cross-Modality Medical Anomaly Detection | SHIH-CHIH LIN, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Shang-Hong Lai |
| TBD | POSTER | BiomedAP: A Vision-Informed Dual-Anchor Framework with Gated Cross-Modal Fusion for Robust Medical Vision-Language Adaptation | Huanyang Tong, Kai Liu, Fangjun Kuang, Huiling Chen |
| TBD | POSTER | Consistent but Dangerous: Per-Sample Safety Classification Reveals False Reliability in Medical Vision-Language Models | Binesh Sadanandan, Vahid Behzadan |
| TBD | POSTER | GIV-CXR: Densely Grounded, Visually Interpretable Chest X-ray Question Answering Dataset | Sreevaatsav Bavana, Adit Rushil Potta, Sai Amrit Patnaik, Nidhi Goyal |
| TBD | POSTER | From Perception to Reasoning: Image-Grounded Knowledge Graphs for Topology-Aware Medical Analysis in Abdominal CT | Udiptaman Das, Krishnasai Bharadwaj Atmakuri, Duy Hoang Ho, Yugyung Lee |
| TBD | POSTER | When the Right Answer Is Missing: Probing Hallucination in Medical Reasoning Models via NOTA Evaluation | Alperen Demirci, Ezel Bayraktar, Bora Dere, Erkut Erdem, Aykut Erdem |
| TBD | POSTER | Why Benchmark Accuracy Fails to Measure Clinical Reasoning in Medical Vision Language Models: Toward Clinical Adversarial Validation | Azmine Toushik Wasi, Mahfuz Ahmed Anik, Mohsin Mahmud Topu, Md Manjurul Ahsan |
| TBD | POSTER | Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Effects on Out-of-Distribution Detection in Dermatology with Vision Foundation Models | Ignazio Gallo, Leonardo Sgroi, Mattia Gatti, Silvia Corchs |
| TBD | POSTER | Parameter-efficient Prompt Tuning and Hierarchical Textual Guidance for Few-shot Whole Slide Image Classification | Jayanie Bogahawatte, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge |
🗓️ Workshop Schedule
Thursday, June 4, 2026 • 1:00 PM – 6:00 PM • Room 110, Denver, Colorado
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 1:00 PM – 1:20 PM | Opening by the Organizers Introduction to the theme |
| 1:20 PM – 1:50 PM |
Invited Talk 1
Hoifung Poon, PhD
Microsoft Research
|
| 1:50 PM – 2:20 PM |
Invited Talk 2
Faisal Mahmood, PhD
Associate Professor · Harvard University
|
| 2:20 PM – 2:50 PM |
Invited Talk 3
Tanishq Mathew Abraham, PhD
Founder & CEO · Sophont
|
| 3:00 PM – 3:40 PM | ☕ Coffee Break Free break Aligned with official CVPR coffee break — ExHall A |
| 3:40 PM – 4:10 PM |
Invited Talk 4
Serena Yeung, PhD
Assistant Professor · Stanford University
|
| 4:10 PM – 4:40 PM |
Invited Talk 5
Maria Xenochristou, PhD
Applied Scientist · Amazon Health Services
|
| 4:40 PM – 4:55 PM |
Oral
To Agree or To Be Right? The Grounding-Sycophancy Tradeoff in Medical Vision-Language Models
OFM Riaz Rahman Aranya, Kevin Desai
|
| 4:55 PM – 5:10 PM |
Oral 2
MOSAIC: Multimodal OA Staging with Adaptive Interpretable Clinical Constraints for Evidence-Grounded Knee MRI Grading
Basit Ali, Sheheryar Khan, Rizwan Qureshi, Muhammad Asim, Mehmood Nawaz, Basim Azam
|
| 5:10 PM – 5:25 PM |
Oral 3
Guideline2Graph: Profile-Aware Multimodal Parsing for Executable Clinical Decision Graphs
Onur Selim Kilic, Yeti Z. Gurbuz, Cem Okan Yaldiz, Afra Nawar, Etrit Haxholli, Oğul Can, Eli Waxman
|
| 5:25 PM – 5:40 PM |
Oral 4
Leveraging Image Editing Foundation Models for Data-Efficient CT Metal Artifact Reduction
Ahmet Rasim Emirdagi, Süleyman Aslan, Mısra Yavuz, Görkay Aydemir, Yunus Bilge Kurt, Nasrin Rahimi, Burak Can Biner, M. Akin Yilmaz
|
| 5:40 PM – 6:00 PM | Summary + Outlook |
Organizers
Anas Zafar
Research Associate
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Muhammad Waqas, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Jia Wu, PhD
Associate Professor
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
David A. Jaffray, PhD
Sr VP, Chief Tech & Digital Officer
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Tianlong Chen, PhD
Assistant Professor
UNC Chapel Hill
Nouha Dziri, PhD
Research Scientist
Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)
Xiaoxiao Li, PhD
Associate Professor
University of British Columbia
Alejandro Lozano
PhD Candidate
Stanford University
Faryab Haye
Applied Scientist
Amazon
Technical Program Committee
Call for Reviewers: If you are interested in contributing to our paper review process, please complete the sign-up form. We will publicly acknowledge our program committee members. Your expertise and time dedicated to this effort are greatly appreciated and crucial to the success of the workshop.
🏆 Awards
We are proud to offer awards to recognize outstanding contributions at the workshop, generously sponsored by Amazon Health Services.
Best Paper Award
2 Awards × $500
Best Presentation Award
2 Awards × $300
Student Travel Grants
Available for student attendees
Sponsors
We gratefully acknowledge the support of our sponsors who make these awards and grants possible.
Amazon Health Services
📅 Important Dates
| Submission Opens | February 06, 2026 |
| Submission Deadline | |
| Notification of Acceptance | March 20, 2026 |
| Camera-Ready Deadline | April 08, 2026 |
| Workshop Date | Thursday, June 4, 2026 • 1:00 PM – 6:00 PM • Room 110, Denver, Colorado |
Contact
If you have any questions, please contact:
AZafar2@mdanderson.org
anaszafar98@gmail.com
News
| Mar 02, 2026 | 📢 Submission deadline extended to March 06, 2026, 11:59 PM AoE. |
| Feb 06, 2026 | 🎉 Call for Papers is now open! Submit your work via OpenReview. Deadline: March 01, 2026. |
| Jan 28, 2026 | Website is live! |