Route, Retrieve, Reflect, Repair: Self-Improving Agentic Framework for Visual Detection and Linguistic Reasoning in Medical Imaging

TL;DR

The paper introduces R^4, a self-improving agentic framework for medical image analysis that decomposes tasks into four coordinated agents to enhance reasoning, safety, and spatial grounding without fine-tuning.

Contribution

It presents a novel four-agent system that improves vision-language model performance in medical imaging through routing, retrieval, reflection, and repair mechanisms.

Findings

Boosts LLM-as-a-Judge scores by +1.7 to +2.5 points.

Increases mAP50 by +2.5 to +3.5 points.

Operates without gradient-based fine-tuning.

Abstract

Medical image analysis increasingly relies on large vision-language models (VLMs), yet most systems remain single-pass black boxes that offer limited control over reasoning, safety, and spatial grounding. We propose R^4, an agentic framework that decomposes medical imaging workflows into four coordinated agents: a Router that configures task- and specialization-aware prompts from the image, patient history, and metadata; a Retriever that uses exemplar memory and pass@k sampling to jointly generate free-text reports and bounding boxes; a Reflector that critiques each draft-box pair for key clinical error modes (negation, laterality, unsupported claims, contradictions, missing findings, and localization errors); and a Repairer that iteratively revises both narrative and spatial outputs under targeted constraints while curating high-quality exemplars for future cases. Instantiated on chest X-ray analysis with multiple modern VLM backbones and evaluated on report generation and weakly supervised detection, R^4 consistently boosts LLM-as-a-Judge scores by roughly +1.7-+2.5 points and mAP50 by +2.5-+3.5 absolute points over strong single-VLM baselines, without any gradient-based fine-tuning. These results show that agentic routing, reflection, and repair can turn strong but brittle VLMs into more reliable and better grounded tools for clinical image interpretation. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/faiyazabdullah/MultimodalMedAgent