Enhancing Generalization in Medical Visual Question Answering Tasks via
  Gradient-Guided Model Perturbation
Gang Liu Hongyang Li Zerui He Shenjun Zhong
Leveraging pre-trained visual language models has become a widely adopted
approach for improving performance in downstream visual question answering
(VQA) applications. However, in the specialized field of medical VQA, the
scarcity of available data poses a significant barrier to achieving reliable
model generalization. Numerous methods have been proposed to enhance model
generalization, addressing the issue from data-centric and model-centric
perspectives. Data augmentation techniques are commonly employed to enrich the
dataset, while various regularization approaches aim to prevent model
overfitting, especially when training on limited data samples. In this paper,
we introduce a method that incorporates gradient-guided parameter perturbations
to the visual encoder of the multimodality model during both pre-training and
fine-tuning phases, to improve model generalization for downstream medical VQA
tasks. The small perturbation is adaptively generated by aligning with the
direction of the moving average gradient in the optimization landscape, which
is opposite to the directions of the optimizer's historical updates. It is
subsequently injected into the model's visual encoder. The results show that,
even with a significantly smaller pre-training image caption dataset, our
approach achieves competitive outcomes on both VQA-RAD and SLAKE datasets.