Dissertation Documents
Core planning and proposal documents for the PhD research on Medical VLM Robustness
Research Planning Documents
📋 Core Documents
- Comprehensive Research Plan — Detailed implementation roadmap with methods and milestones
- Dissertation Proposal — Formal research proposal with RQs, hypotheses, and deliverables
- Timeline & Milestones — Quarterly breakdown through August 2026 defense
🎯 Research Focus
The Robustness Gauntlet: A comprehensive framework for evaluating and enhancing medical Vision-Language Models on chest X-ray visual question answering, addressing:
- Linguistic robustness to paraphrase variations
- Visual robustness to perturbations and distribution shifts
- Interpretability through attention grounding analysis
- Safety via clinical triage mechanisms
📊 Key Deliverables
- Open-source toolkit for VLM robustness evaluation
- Enhanced models with improved robustness
- Benchmark datasets for paraphrase and visual testing
- Publications at MICCAI, NeurIPS, npj Digital Medicine
- Clinical resources for safe deployment
🗓️ Major Milestones
- March 2025: MICCAI submission on evaluation methodology
- June 2025: NeurIPS submission on enhancement techniques
- April 2025: Toolkit v1.0 release
- November 2025: RSNA clinical demonstration
- February 2026: Journal submission
- November 2026: Dissertation defense
Related Resources
- Robustness Gauntlet Framework — Technical framework details
- LLaVA-RAD — Primary evaluation model
- MedGemma — Comparison model
- Triage System — Safety component