Improvise, Adapt, Overcome -- Telescopic Adapters for Efficient Fine-tuning of Vision Language Models in Medical Imaging

Adapting Vision Language Segmentation Models (VLSMs) to medical imaging domains requires significant computational overhead when using conventional fine-tuning approaches. Existing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods apply uniform adapter dimensions across all transformer layers, leading to suboptimal parameter allocation and reduced adaptation efficiency. We introduce Telescopic Adapters, a novel PEFT framework that employs depth-aware scaling to progressively increase adapter capacity from shallow to deep transformer layers. Our method integrates lightweight bottleneck modules within CLIPSeg's vision and text encoders, with adapter dimensions dynamically scaled based on layer depth and semantic relevance. Using only 613k trainable parameters--244x fewer than end-to-end fine-tuning, Telescopic Adapters achieve superior performance across five diverse medical datasets spanning polyp segmentation, skin lesion detection, and breast ultrasound imaging. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate that deeper layers require substantially more adaptation capacity than shallow layers, validating our telescopic scaling hypothesis. Our approach establishes a new paradigm for efficient medical VLSM fine-tuning, enabling deployment in resource-constrained clinical environments while maintaining competitive segmentation accuracy.

Towards Blind and Low-Vision Accessibility of Lightweight VLMs and Custom LLM-Evals

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at understanding and generating video descriptions but their high memory, computation, and deployment demands hinder practical use particularly for blind and low-vision (BLV) users who depend on detailed, context-aware descriptions. To study the effect of model size on accessibility-focused description quality, we evaluate SmolVLM2 variants with 500M and 2.2B parameters across two diverse datasets: AVCaps (outdoor), and Charades (indoor). In this work, we introduce two novel evaluation frameworks specifically designed for BLV accessibility assessment: the Multi-Context BLV Framework evaluating spatial orientation, social interaction, action events, and ambience contexts; and the Navigational Assistance Framework focusing on mobility-critical information. Additionally, we conduct a systematic evaluation of four different prompt design strategies and deploy both models on a smartphone, evaluating FP32 and INT8 precision variants to assess real-world performance constraints on resource-limited mobile devices.