When Evidence Vanishes: Distilling Visual-Evidence Dependency in Medical Vision-Language Models

Abstract

Compact medical vision-language models (VLMs) can answer clinical questions correctly without reliably using the image, relying instead on question wording or learned priors. Standard knowledge distillation copies a teacher's answer preference on the original image, but it leaves unchecked whether that preference is conditional on the visual evidence required by the question. We study this missing target as medical visual evidence dependency: support for the correct answer should decrease when the matched evidence is absent. We introduce Evidence-Conditioned Dependency Distillation (ECDD), which pairs each training image with a control matched to the evidence level and distills the teacher's drop in answer margin across the pair. A lower bound objective transfers positive dependency by penalizing only shortfalls, while original-image supervision preserves task accuracy. The same formulation applies when the evidence is a queried clinical region, a surgical instrument, or whole-image visual content. Across three medical VQA settings, ECDD keeps original-image accuracy competitive with distillation and alignment baselines while making answer support more sensitive to evidence removal. Under the DME headline objective, for example, the positive-case margin response to target rather than random masking rises from 0.786 with KD to 2.023 with ECDD, while original-image accuracy differs by 0.11 points. These results suggest that medical VLM distillation should transfer both the teacher's answer preference and its dependence on visual evidence.