Surgery-R1: Advancing Surgical-VQLA with Reasoning Multimodal Large Language Model via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of surgical scene understanding, particularly in the task of Visual Question Localized-Answering in robotic surgery (Surgical-VQLA). However, existing Surgical-VQLA models lack deep reasoning capabilities and interpretability in surgical scenes, which limits their reliability and potential for development in clinical applications. To address this issue, inspired by the development of Reasoning Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), we first build the Surgery-R1-54k dataset, including paired data for Visual-QA, Grounding-QA, and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Then, we propose the first Reasoning MLLM for Surgical-VQLA (Surgery-R1). In our Surgery-R1, we design a two-stage fine-tuning mechanism to enable the basic MLLM with complex reasoning abilities by utilizing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Furthermore, for an efficient and high-quality rule-based reward system in our RFT, we design a Multimodal Coherence reward mechanism to mitigate positional illusions that may arise in surgical scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate that Surgery-R1 outperforms other existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in the Surgical-VQLA task and widely-used MLLMs, while also validating its reasoning capabilities and the effectiveness of our approach. The code and dataset will be organized in https://github.com/FiFi-HAO467/Surgery-R1.