unified models and agents for health

Junzhi Ning

My research focuses on unified multimodal models and agents for health, spanning medical image understanding and generation, evidence-grounded reasoning, and evaluation. My broader work explores multimodal reasoning and agentic methods in general and scientific settings.

I am currently exploring agent–model collaboration and iterative improvement through feedback.

Open for collaboration

I am excited to explore research collaborations and research internship opportunities across AI, from healthcare and science to new directions. If you have an idea, a project, or an opportunity in mind, I would love to connect!

Feel free to reach out via Email or WeChat. I would be very happy to chat!

I completed an MRes (Distinction) at Imperial College London (Sep 2023 – Oct 2024), with a research project on chest X-ray image analysis for lung diagnosis, supervised by Dr. Matthieu Komorowski and Dr. Guang Yang.

My earlier studies include a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Data Science with University Medal from The University of Sydney, a concurrent Diploma in Computing, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Statistics from The University of Melbourne (First-Class Honours).

I have also benefited from the research guidance of Mingming Gong at the University of Melbourne and Junjun He at the General Medical AI (GMAI) group, Shanghai AI Laboratory.

Unified Models · Agents · AI for Health

Unified models and agents for health

My research focuses on unified multimodal models and agents for health, spanning medical image understanding and generation, evidence-grounded reasoning, and evaluation. My broader work explores multimodal reasoning and agentic methods in general and scientific settings. I am currently exploring agent–model collaboration and iterative improvement through feedback.

Research directionsUnified Models · Agents

Primary focusAI for Health

Broader applicationsGeneral AI · AI for Science

01 AI for Health

AI for Health

My primary focus is medical multimodal understanding and generation, evidence-grounded reasoning, and the evaluation and improvement of medical models and agents.

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02 General AI

General AI

Broader work on visual reasoning and agentic retrieval, including visual alignment in SIVA-RL.

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03 AI for Science

AI for Science

Collaborative work on scientific multimodal foundation models and scientist-aligned evaluation, including Intern-S1 and SGI-Bench.

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Explore publications and research history .

Research highlights

Selected work on medical multimodal understanding and generation, model evaluation, and improvement, alongside a scientific-model collaboration.

Publication list

Explore the research history through papers, publication venues, and original resources. Browse by application domain or research direction.

Summary: 6× MICCAI, 1× ICML, 1× ECCV, 1× NeurIPS, 1× ICLR, 1× EMNLP Main, 1× EMNLP Findings, 1× IJCAI, 1× WACV, 1× ISBI, 1× PRL, 1× OJEMB

Published & accepted · MICCAI: 1 Spotlight (Best Paper Nominee) · MICCAI: 1 Oral · EMNLP Main: 1 Oral

All publications · Newest first

2026 NeurIPS Co-author Accepted Poster

MedVTok: A General-Purpose Medical Visual Tokenizer

Chenglong Ma, Yuanfeng Ji, Junzhi Ning, Jiyao Liu, Yujie Wei, Shaohao Rui, Chaoyang Zhang, Wenjie Li, Wenhao Tang, Cheng Tang, Wei Li, Shujian Gao, Yujie Zhang, Ying Chen, Zilong Li, Zongyuan Ge, Diping Song, Jin Ye, Ming Hu, Junjun He, Hongming Shan

NeurIPS 2026

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Data Synthesis Unified Understanding & Generation 2D and 3D tokenization Medical visual tokenizer
2026 ECCV Co-first author Poster

MedQ-Deg: A Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating MLLMs Across Medical Image Quality Degradations

Jiyao Liu*, Junzhi Ning*, Chenglong Ma*, Wanying Qu, Jianghan Shen, Siqi Luo, Jinjie Wei, Jin Ye, Pengze Li, Tianbin Li, Jiashi Lin, Hongming Shan, Xinzhe Luo, Xiaohong Liu, Lihao Liu, Junjun He, Ningsheng Xu
* Equal contribution

ECCV 2026 · Proceedings, Part IX, pp. 246–264

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Benchmarking and Survey Image quality degradation Robustness evaluation Confidence calibration
2026 MICCAI Co-author

Open World MRI Reconstruction with Bias-Calibrated Adaptation

Jiyao Liu, Shangqi Gao, Lihao Liu, Junzhi Ning, Jinjie Wei, Junjun He, Xiahai Zhuang, Ningsheng Xu

MICCAI 2026

AI for Health MRI reconstruction Distribution shift
2026 MICCAI Co-first author

MedQ-Engine: A Closed-Loop Data Engine for Evolving MLLMs in Medical Image Quality Assessment

Jiyao Liu†, Junzhi Ning†, Wanying Qu, Lihao Liu, Chenglong Ma, Junjun He, Ningsheng Xu
† Equal contribution

MICCAI 2026

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Data engine Model improvement
2026 Research paper Co-author Preprint

SIVA-RL: Sensitivity-Invariance Visual Alignment for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning

Cheng Tang, Junzhi Ning, Min Cen, Wei Li, Xinyi Zeng, Pinxian Zeng, Rongbin Li, Qiming Zhu, Yuqiang Li, Junjun He, Yirong Chen, Ming Hu

Research paper · 2026

General AI AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Visual alignment Reinforcement learning
2026 ICML First author

UniMedVL: Unifying Medical Multimodal Understanding and Generation through Observation-Knowledge-Analysis

Junzhi Ning*, Wei Li*, Cheng Tang*, Jiashi Lin, Chenglong Ma, Chaoyang Zhang, Jiyao Liu, et al.
* Equal contribution

ICML 2026

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Data Synthesis Unified Understanding & Generation Understanding & generation
2026 Research paper Co-author Preprint

C²GR: Coupled Comprehensive Generative Replay for a Continually Learnable Universal Segmentation Model

Wei Li, Jingyang Zhang, Guoan Wang, Junzhi Ning, Yang Chen, Guang Yang, Lixu Gu

Research paper · 2026

AI for Health Data Synthesis Continual learning Medical segmentation
2026 OJEMB Co-author

Anatomy-Guided Radiology Report Generation With Pathology-Aware Regional Prompts

Yijian Gao, Dominic Marshall, Xiaodan Xing, Junzhi Ning, Congren Dai, Giorgos Papanastasiou, Guang Yang, Matthieu Komorowski

IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology 2026

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Report generation Anatomical grounding
2026 Benchmark Co-author Preprint

MedProbeBench: Systematic Benchmarking at Deep Evidence Integration for Expert-level Medical Guideline

Jiyao Liu, Jianghan Shen, Sida Song, Tianbin Li, Xiaojia Liu, Rongbin Li, Ziyan Huang, Jiashi Lin, Junzhi Ning, Changkai Ji, Siqi Luo, Wenjie Li, Chenglong Ma, Ming Hu, Jing Xiong, Jin Ye, Bin Fu, Ningsheng Xu, Yirong Chen, Lei Jin, Hong Chen, Junjun He

Benchmark · 2026

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Benchmarking and Survey Medical guidelines Evidence integration
2026 ICLR · Under Review Co-first author Under Review

MMRareBench: A Rare-Disease Multimodal and Multi-Image Medical Benchmark

Junzhi Ning*, Jiashi Lin*, Yingying Fang, Wei Li, Jiyao Liu, Cheng Tang, Chenglong Ma, Wenhao Tang, Tianbin Li, Ziyan Huang, Guang Yang, Junjun He
* Equal contribution

ICLR · Under Review

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Benchmarking and Survey Rare diseases Multi-image evidence
2026 Survey Co-author Preprint

Project Imaging-X: A Survey of 1000+ Open-Access Medical Imaging Datasets for Foundation Model Development

Zhongying Deng, Cheng Tang, Ziyan Huang, Jiashi Lin, Ying Chen, Junzhi Ning, et al.

Survey · 2026

AI for Health Benchmarking and Survey Dataset catalog
2026 ICLR Co-author

Escaping Low-Rank Traps: Interpretable Visual Concept Learning via Implicit Vector Quantization

Shujian Gao, Yuan Wang, Chenglong Ma, Xin Gao, Jiangtao Yan, Junzhi Ning, Cheng Tang, Changkai Ji, Huihui Xu, Wei Li, Ziyan Huang, Jiashi Lin, Ming Hu, Jiyao Liu, Wenhao Tang, Ye Du, Tianbin Li, Jin Ye, Junjun He

ICLR 2026

General AI Agents & Multimodal Models Concept bottleneck models Interpretability
2026 EMNLP Main Co-author Accepted Oral

Can MLLMs Perceive and Describe Medical Image Quality Beyond Scores?

Jiyao Liu, Jinjie Wei, Wanying Qu, Chenglong Ma, Junzhi Ning, Yunheng Li, Ying Chen, Jiafan Zhang, Pengcheng Chen, Xin Gao, Ming Hu, Xin Wang, Shujian Gao, Dingkang Yang, Zhongying Deng, et al.

EMNLP 2026 Main Conference

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Benchmarking and Survey Medical IQA MedQ-Bench
2026 EMNLP Findings Co-author Accepted

THE-Tree: Can Tracing Historical Evolution Enhance Scientific Verification and Reasoning?

Xin Wang, Jiyao Liu, Yulong Xiao, Junzhi Ning, Hairong Zhang, Lihao Liu, Junjun He, Botian Shi, Kaicheng Yu

Findings of EMNLP 2026

AI for Science Scientific verification Literature reasoning
2025 Benchmark Co-author Preprint

Probing Scientific General Intelligence of LLMs with Scientist-Aligned Workflows

Wanghan Xu, Yuhao Zhou, Yifan Zhou, Qinglong Cao, …, Junzhi Ning, et al.

Benchmark · 2025

AI for Science Agents & Multimodal Models Benchmarking and Survey Scientific workflows
2025 MICCAI Co-author Best Paper Nominee Spotlight

MedGround-R1: Advancing Medical Image Grounding via Spatial-Semantic Rewarded Group Relative Policy Optimization

Huihui Xu, Yuanpeng Nie, Hualiang Wang, Ying Chen, Wei Li, Junzhi Ning, Lihao Liu, Hongqiu Wang, Lei Zhu, Jiyao Liu, Xiaomeng Li, Junjun He

MICCAI 2025

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Medical grounding Reinforcement learning
2025 MICCAI First author

RetinaLogos: Fine-Grained Synthesis of High-Resolution Retinal Images Through Captions

Junzhi Ning*, Cheng Tang*, Kaijing Zhou, Diping Song, Lihao Liu, Ming Hu, Wei Li, Huihui Xu, Yanzhou Su, Tianbin Li, Jiyao Liu, Jin Ye, Sheng Zhang, Yuanfeng Ji, Junjun He
* Equal contribution

MICCAI 2025

AI for Health Data Synthesis Retinal image synthesis
2025 MICCAI Co-author

Multi-modal MRI Translation via Evidential Regression and Distribution Calibration

Jiyao Liu, Shangqi Gao, Yuxin Li, Lihao Liu, Xin Gao, Zhaohu Xing, Junzhi Ning, Yanzhou Su, Xiao-Yong Zhang, Junjun He, Ningsheng Xu, Xiahai Zhuang

MICCAI 2025

AI for Health Data Synthesis MRI translation Uncertainty estimation
2025 MICCAI Co-author Oral

Ophora: A Large-Scale Data-Driven Text-Guided Ophthalmic Surgical Video Generation Model

Wei Li, Ming Hu, Guoan Wang, Lihao Liu, Kaijing Zhou, Junzhi Ning, Xin Guo, Zongyuan Ge, Lixu Gu, Junjun He

MICCAI 2025

AI for Health Data Synthesis Surgical video generation
2025 Survey Co-author Preprint

A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers

Ming Hu, Chenglong Ma, Wei Li, …, Junzhi Ning, et al.

Survey · 2025

AI for Science Agents & Multimodal Models Benchmarking and Survey Scientific AI survey
2025 Technical report Co-author

Intern-S1: A Scientific Multimodal Foundation Model

Lei Bai, Zhongrui Cai, Yuhang Cao, …, Junzhi Ning, et al.

Technical report · 2025

General AI AI for Science Agents & Multimodal Models Scientific foundation model Multimodal reasoning
2025 PRL First author

Unpaired Translation of Chest X-ray Images for Lung Opacity Diagnosis via Adaptive Activation Masks and Cross-Domain Alignment

Junzhi Ning¹, Dominic Marshall¹, Yijian Gao, Xiaodan Xing, Yang Nan, Yingying Fang, Sheng Zhang, Matthieu Komorowski, Guang Yang
¹ Co-first authors, equal contribution

Pattern Recognition Letters 193, 21–28 (2025)

AI for Health Data Synthesis Chest X-ray translation
2025 Research paper Co-author Preprint

Unified Medical Image Tokenizer for Autoregressive Synthesis and Understanding

Chenglong Ma, Yuanfeng Ji, Jin Ye, Zilong Li, Chenhui Wang, Junzhi Ning, Wei Li, Lihao Liu, Qiushan Guo, Tianbin Li, Junjun He, Hongming Shan

Research paper · 2025 · revised 2026

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Data Synthesis Unified Understanding & Generation Medical image tokenizer
2025 ISBI First author

Unveiling the Capabilities of Latent Diffusion Models for Classification of Lung Diseases in Chest X-Rays

Junzhi Ning, Xiaodan Xing, Sheng Zhang, Xiao Ma, Guang Yang

IEEE ISBI 2025

AI for Health Chest X-ray classification Latent diffusion
2025 Research paper Co-author Preprint

GMAI-VL-R1: Harnessing Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Medical Reasoning

Yanzhou Su, Tianbin Li, Jiyao Liu, Chenglong Ma, Junzhi Ning, Cheng Tang, Sibo Ju, Jin Ye, Pengcheng Chen, Ming Hu, Shixiang Tang, Lihao Liu, Bin Fu, Wenqi Shao, Xiaowei Hu, Xiangwen Liao, Yuanfeng Ji, Junjun He

Research paper · 2025

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Medical reasoning
2025 WACV Co-author

DMRN: A Dynamical Multi-Order Response Network for the Robust Lung Airway Segmentation

Sheng Zhang, Jinge Wu, Junzhi Ning, Guang Yang

WACV 2025

AI for Health Airway segmentation CT imaging
2025 IJCAI Co-author

Cyclic Vision-Language Manipulator: Towards Reliable and Fine-Grained Image Interpretation for Automated Report Generation

Yingying Fang, Zihao Jin, Shaojie Guo, Jinda Liu, Zhiling Yue, Yijian Gao, Junzhi Ning, Zhi Li, Simon Walsh, Guang Yang

IJCAI 2025 Main Track, pp. 357–366

AI for Health Agents & Multimodal Models Data Synthesis Counterfactual explanations Report generation
2024 AIM-FM Workshop Co-first author Workshop paper

Deep Generative Models Unveil Patterns in Medical Images Through Vision-Language Conditioning

Xiaodan Xing*, Junzhi Ning*, Yang Nan, Guang Yang
* Equal contribution

AIM-FM Workshop at NeurIPS 2024

AI for Health Data Synthesis Vision-language conditioning CT image synthesis

More on my Google Scholar profile ↗.

View original paper ↗

Skills & Expertise

Methods and tools for medical multimodal models, agents, data synthesis, and evaluation, with broader general and scientific applications.

Research Interests

  • Unified multimodal models for health
  • Agents and multimodal models
  • AI for Health, with broader general and scientific applications
  • Data synthesis and multimodal learning
  • Benchmarking and Survey
  • Agent–model collaboration (exploring)

Technical Skills

  • Medical Imaging: Chest X-ray, Retinal, MRI, CT
  • Image Segmentation & Classification
  • Image Translation & Synthesis
  • PyTorch, TensorFlow
  • Python, NumPy, Pandas

Tools & Platforms

  • High-Performance Computing (HPC)
  • Clinical Imaging Data Pipelines
  • Version Control: Git, GitHub
  • Experiment Tracking: Weights & Biases
  • SLURM, Docker

Awards & Honors

Academic achievements and recognitions throughout my research journey.

Aug 2023 Highest Honor

University Medal, University of Sydney

Awarded University Medal in Bachelor of Science (Honours) for achieving the highest academic distinction (WAM 89.5) in Data Science Honours program. The honour thesis on night-to-day image translation was subsequently accepted at the Australasian Database Conference.

2022 Scholarship

Melbourne International Undergraduate Scholarship

Received merit-based scholarship from University of Melbourne in recognition of academic excellence in Mathematics and Statistics (Overall WAM: 86.8/First Class Honours).

2019 Academic Recognition

Dean's Honours List, University of Melbourne

Placed on Dean's Honours List for First Year Bachelor of Science students for exceptional academic performance among the entire cohort.

Updates

Research, open-source releases, and personal milestones.

Sep 2026

MedVTok accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (Poster).

Paper

Sep 2026

MedQ-Deg published at ECCV 2026 (Poster).

Paper

Jul 2026

UniMedVL published at ICML 2026. Model checkpoints and selected training data are available.

Paper · Model & data

Jun 2026

Selected UniMedVL-5M data are now available by request.

Data

Mar 2026

Contributed to Project Imaging-X, a survey and catalog of 1,000+ open-access medical imaging datasets.

Paper · Catalog

2026

IVQ-CBM published at ICLR 2026.

Paper

Sep 2025

MedGround-R1 presented as a MICCAI Spotlight and Best Paper Nominee.

Paper

Aug 2025

Contributed to Intern-S1, a scientific multimodal foundation model.

Paper · Model

2025

Unpaired chest X-ray translation published in Pattern Recognition Letters.

Paper

2025

Chest X-ray classification work accepted at ISBI 2025.

Paper

Oct 2024

Completed my MRes at Imperial College London with Distinction.

Background

Aug 2023

Awarded the University Medal at the University of Sydney.

Details

2023

My honours thesis accepted at the Australasian Database Conference 2023.

Background

Affiliations & training

Research training across the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, and Imperial College London — a path through data science, mathematics, and medical imaging.

Reviewer Service

Journals

TMI

Conferences

ICLR 2026, ICLR 2027, ICML 2026, KDD 2027, ISBI 2026, MICCAI 2026, ECCV 2026

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my supervisors and mentors, Guang Yang, Matthieu Komorowski, and Mingming Gong, and to my research leaders at Shanghai AI Laboratory, Junjun He and Yirong Chen, for their guidance and support. I also thank my senior collaborators Ming Hu, Ziyan Huang, Jin Ye, and Yuanfeng Ji for their advice and close collaboration.

I also thank Jiyao Liu, Cheng Tang, Wei Li, Lihao Liu, Sheng Zhang, Xiaodan Xing, Yingying Fang, Jinjie Wei, and my other collaborators for their ideas, discussions, and contributions to our research.

Open for collaboration

I am excited to explore research collaborations and research internship opportunities across AI, from healthcare and science to new directions. If you have an idea, a project, or an opportunity in mind, I would love to connect!

Collaborations

Have something in mind? Reach out by email or WeChat. I would be very happy to chat!

Quick profile

  • MRes Imperial College London (Distinction)
  • BSc (Hons) Data Science, University of Sydney (University Medal)
  • Interests Unified Models · Agents · AI for Health

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