RL4Med-DDPO: Reinforcement Learning for Controlled Guidance Towards Diverse Medical Image Generation using Vision-Language Foundation Models

Abstract: Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLFM) have shown a tremendous increase in performance in terms of generating high-resolution, photorealistic natural images. While VLFMs show a rich understanding of semantic content across modalities, they often struggle with fine-grained alignment tasks that require precise correspondence between image regions and textual descriptions a limitation in medical imaging, where accurate localization and detection of clinical features are essential for diagnosis and analysis. To address this issue, we propose a multi-stage architecture where a pre-trained VLFM provides a cursory semantic understanding, while a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm refines the alignment through an iterative process that optimizes for understanding semantic context. The reward signal is designed to align the semantic information of the text with synthesized images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a medical imaging skin dataset where the generated images exhibit improved generation quality and alignment with prompt over the fine-tuned Stable Diffusion. We also show that the synthesized samples could be used to improve disease classifier performance for underrepresented subgroups through augmentation.