Seahawk at MedGenVidQA 2026: LLM Segment-Range Selection for Medical Visual Answer Localization

· Source: Paper Index on ACL Anthology · Field: Technology & Digital — Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Health & Medical Research, Natural Language Processing · Depth: Expert, medium

Summary

Xiaotian Tian and Gulustan Dogan's paper, "Seahawk at MedGenVidQA 2026," introduces a novel retrieval-and-selection pipeline for medical visual answer localization, a task requiring identification of temporal spans in videos that answer medical questions. Their system, designed for Task C, frames this as selecting contiguous transcript segments from timestamped video transcripts. Instead of directly generating timestamps, the system prompts DeepSeek to choose a segment range, from which start and end times are deterministically calculated. This method significantly decreases the risk of hallucinated or malformed temporal outputs. To handle extended video content, the approach employs overlapping sliding-window prompting and ranks potential ranges using lexical question matching. A 20-sample sanity check on a test dataset demonstrated that a completeness-biased configuration achieved an mIoU of 0.3217, while a duration-penalized configuration improved performance to 0.4815. These results position the constrained LLM-based segment selection with deterministic timestamp extraction as a practical baseline.

Key takeaway

For Machine Learning Engineers developing medical visual answer localization systems, you should consider adopting a constrained LLM segment selection approach. This method, which deterministically extracts timestamps from selected transcript segments, significantly mitigates hallucination risks common with direct timestamp generation. Implement overlapping sliding-window prompting to efficiently process long video transcripts, improving robustness and accuracy in your applications.

Key insights

Constrained LLM segment selection with deterministic timestamp extraction effectively localizes medical video answers, reducing hallucination risks.

Principles

Method

A retrieval-and-selection pipeline prompts DeepSeek to select contiguous transcript segments. Start/end times are deterministically computed from segment boundaries. Overlapping sliding-window prompting and lexical ranking support long videos.

In practice

Topics

Best for: NLP Engineer, AI Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Research Scientist

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Paper Index on ACL Anthology.