About

Biomedical data spans diverse modalities across biological scales—from molecular genomics and cellular microscopy to tissue pathology, organ-level radiology, and patient-level electronic health records. While each modality provides unique insights, integrating these heterogeneous data sources remains a significant challenge in creating comprehensive biomedical understanding.

The Multimodal Foundation Models for Biomedicine (MMFM-BIOMED) workshop brings together experts across disciplines to tackle this challenge. The workshop explores two critical questions:

• Technical Challenges: What are the core limitations of existing multimodal learning techniques when applied to biomedical data? Challenges include cross-modal alignment between data with different spatial and temporal resolutions; handling extreme data imbalances between well-annotated and sparse modalities; maintaining modality-specific contexts while enabling knowledge transfer across domains.

• New Opportunities: What transformative opportunities do multimodal foundation models unlock in biomedicine? Potential breakthroughs include multi-scale disease diagnosis by combining radiology images with pathology slides; personalized treatment by integrating wearable sensor data with genomic profiles; context-aware operations by synchronizing surgical videos with patient records.

Invited Speakers

Call for Papers

We invite short, non-archival position paper submissions (4 pages maximum excluding references) that explore both challenges and opportunities in multimodal foundation models for biomedicine. We encourage two types of submissions:

• Challenges in Current Techniques – Papers highlighting limitations in existing methods, particularly simple yet intuitive approaches that unexpectedly lead to negative outcomes. Example topics include:

  • • Multimodal foundation models – pre-training, post-training, alignment

    • Agentic framework – design, evaluation, control

    • Benchmark and evaluation – failure modes, reproducibility

• Opportunities with Multimodal Foundation Models – Papers showcasing novel applications, especially in underexplored areas such as drug discovery and surgery.

Submissions will be accepted via the OpenReview platform, and selected papers will be featured as poster presentations, with three receiving spotlight oral presentations during the workshop.

Submission deadline: April 30, 2025.

Organizers