Are there tasks where multimodal integration hinders performance?

Your report demonstrates that MedGemma achieves “advanced medical understanding and reasoning on images and text” and “significantly exceed[s] the performance of similar-sized generative models”. You also stated that MedGemma showed “only minor decreases in performance relative to the general models of the same size” on non-medical benchmarks. While this strongly suggests multimodal capabilities are highly beneficial, did you observe any specific scenarios or task types where the multimodal integration inadvertently hindered performance compared to a purely single-domain (e.g., text-only or image-only) approach, beyond these minor general-purpose decreases?

Hi there,

No, we didn’t see any systematic regressions when designing multimodal models vs. unimodal models, besides the slight decrease in performance on a few benchmarks that you noted.

Best,

Dan
Engineering Manager on the HAI-DEF team