Enterprise AI Analysis

The development of DentalGPT involves a two-stage training process. Stage I: Multimodal Understanding Enhancement focuses on strengthening the MLLM's understanding of dental images by injecting high-quality dental knowledge from a large, professionally curated image-text dataset of over 120k images. This dataset includes Image Captioning data, Instruction Tuning data, and Complex Reasoning data, along with general-domain data to prevent overfitting. Stage II: Reinforcement Learning for Complex Reasoning leverages the enhanced understanding from Stage I. The GRPO algorithm is applied using a new dataset of dental multiple-choice questions, with a composite reward function considering both format and accuracy. This stage guides the model to explore more explanatory solutions and improve complex reasoning capabilities.

Comprehensive evaluations were conducted on MMOral Bench, a dentistry-focused subset of medical VQA benchmarks, and professionally annotated intraoral and panoramic images. DentalGPT, despite its compact 7B parameters, consistently surpasses existing MLLMs in dental image understanding and question answering. For instance, it achieved an 84% accuracy on Panorama-Classification and an average of 67.1% across all benchmarks, significantly outperforming its backbone Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct. In-depth analysis revealed that higher knowledge density and professional quality of training data, combined with staged adaptation, are critical for shaping DentalGPT's specialized capabilities.

This work introduces DentalGPT, a specialized MLLM for multimodal diagnosis in dentistry. By constructing the largest annotated dental image dataset to date and integrating high-quality domain knowledge through a staged enhancement of multimodal understanding and reinforcement learning, DentalGPT gains the ability to capture fine-grained visual cues and perform more reliable disease-related reasoning. Its strong performance across various dental benchmarks, despite its compact size, highlights the critical role of domain-specific data and training strategies in advancing dental AI. DentalGPT serves as a foundational model for future research and applications in automated dental imaging and intelligent oral healthcare.