MedGPT-oss: Training a General-Purpose Vision-Language Model for Biomedicine

arXiv:2603.00842 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-03-01 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-03-01

Updated: 2026-09-21

Comments: Technical report, work in progress

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Biomedical multimodal assistants have the potential to unify radiology, pathology, and clinical-text reasoning, yet a critical deployment gap remains: top-performing systems are either closed-source

Terminology

Abstract

Biomedical multimodal assistants have the potential to unify radiology, pathology, and clinical-text reasoning, yet a critical deployment gap remains: top-performing systems are either closed-source or computationally prohibitive, precluding the on-premises deployment required for patient privacy and PHI compliance. We introduce MEDGPT-OSS, an open-weight, 20B-parameter generalist vision-language model designed to facilitate open research in clinical AI. Rather than relying on architectural complexity, MEDGPT-OSS pairs the GPT-oss language backbone with a visual front-end via a optimized, three-stage training curriculum. By progressively domain-adapting these modules through rigorous data curation and long-context multimodal alignment, we demonstrate that a 20B model can bridge the capacity gap. It successfully outperforms larger open medical models on out-of-distribution (OOD) multimodal reasoning and complex text-only clinical tasks. By unifying diverse modalities under a single instruction-following interface, MEDGPT-OSS maintains a parameter-efficient footprint fully compatible with commodity GPUs. We release the complete training recipe, open-weight checkpoints, and a rigorous evaluation harness to serve as a verifiable foundation for privacy-preserving, institution-specific clinical AI research.

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