ECHO: Efficient Chest X-ray Report Generation with One-step Block Diffusion

arXiv:2604.09450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chest X-ray report generation (CXR-RG) has the potential to substantially alleviate radiologists' workload. However, conventional autoregressive vision--language models (VLMs) suffer from high inference latency due to sequential token decoding. Diffusion-based models offer a promising alternative through parallel generation, but they still require multiple denoising iterations. Compressing multi-step denoising to a single step could further reduc