MedQA-MM: Shortcuts Behind Medical Visual Reasoning
EMNLP 2026 Poster
Auditing shortcut cues to test whether medical benchmark scores reflect image-grounded reasoning.
About me
Hi ! I'm Benlu, a PhD student at UMass Amherst in the BioNLP group.
My research focuses on medical reasoning and evaluation in language models, including multimodal question answering, evidence-based medical calculations, and medical procedure coding. I study how models use clinical and visual evidence, where their reasoning fails, and how to evaluate and improve it.
News
- MedQA-MM โ EMNLP 2026 (Poster). Our benchmark is now available!
- CPTCoder is published at ACL 2026 System Demonstrations.
- MedThinkVQA is published at ICLR 2026 (Poster).
- From Scores to Steps is published at EMNLP 2025 (Oral).
Selected Publications
Full list* Equal contribution.
CPTCoder: A Reliable LLM System for Medical Procedure Code Prediction
ACL 2026 ยท System Demonstrations
A human-in-the-loop system for procedure coding, with constrained decoding and interpretable confidence.
Medical thinking with multiple images
ICLR 2026 Poster
MedThinkVQA evaluates clinical reasoning that requires integrating evidence across multiple medical images.
From Scores to Steps: Diagnosing and Improving LLM Performance in Evidence-Based Medical Calculations
EMNLP 2025 Oral
Step-level evaluation of medical calculations, and a framework for improving evidence use and calculation accuracy.
Education
Academic Degrees
Sep 2026 โ Present
Aug 2024 โ May 2025
Yale University
MS ยท Computer Science
Sep 2020 โ May 2024
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
BS ยท Computer Engineering
Sep 2020 โ Jun 2024
Zhejiang University
BEng ยท Computer Engineering
Research Experience
Sep 2026 โ Present
Sep 2025 โ Sep 2026
Yale University
Postgraduate Associate (Predoc) ยท Full-time
Post-training and evaluation of language and multimodal models for clinical reasoning.
Mar 2025 โ Aug 2025
Yale University
Research Assistant ยท Part-time
Clinical NLP and medical AI, including radiology report generation, medical reasoning, and retrieval-augmented language models.
Teaching
Fall 2026
COMPSCI 230 ยท Computer Systems Principles
Teaching Assistant ยท UMass Amherst