2022-09-21 更新
Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text
Authors:Yuhao Zhang, Hang Jiang, Yasuhide Miura, Christopher D. Manning, Curtis P. Langlotz
Learning visual representations of medical images (e.g., X-rays) is core to medical image understanding but its progress has been held back by the scarcity of human annotations. Existing work commonly relies on fine-tuning weights transferred from ImageNet pretraining, which is suboptimal due to drastically different image characteristics, or rule-based label extraction from the textual report data paired with medical images, which is inaccurate and hard to generalize. Meanwhile, several recent studies show exciting results from unsupervised contrastive learning from natural images, but we find these methods help little on medical images because of their high inter-class similarity. We propose ConVIRT, an alternative unsupervised strategy to learn medical visual representations by exploiting naturally occurring paired descriptive text. Our new method of pretraining medical image encoders with the paired text data via a bidirectional contrastive objective between the two modalities is domain-agnostic, and requires no additional expert input. We test ConVIRT by transferring our pretrained weights to 4 medical image classification tasks and 2 zero-shot retrieval tasks, and show that it leads to image representations that considerably outperform strong baselines in most settings. Notably, in all 4 classification tasks, our method requires only 10\% as much labeled training data as an ImageNet initialized counterpart to achieve better or comparable performance, demonstrating superior data efficiency.
PDF First published in 2020. Accepted at Machine Learning for Healthcare (MLHC) 2022
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Non-Linguistic Supervision for Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings
Authors:Yiren Jian, Chongyang Gao, Soroush Vosoughi
Semantic representation learning for sentences is an important and well-studied problem in NLP. The current trend for this task involves training a Transformer-based sentence encoder through a contrastive objective with text, i.e., clustering sentences with semantically similar meanings and scattering others. In this work, we find the performance of Transformer models as sentence encoders can be improved by training with multi-modal multi-task losses, using unpaired examples from another modality (e.g., sentences and unrelated image/audio data). In particular, besides learning by the contrastive loss on text, our model clusters examples from a non-linguistic domain (e.g., visual/audio) with a similar contrastive loss at the same time. The reliance of our framework on unpaired non-linguistic data makes it language-agnostic, enabling it to be widely applicable beyond English NLP. Experiments on 7 semantic textual similarity benchmarks reveal that models trained with the additional non-linguistic (images/audio) contrastive objective lead to higher quality sentence embeddings. This indicates that Transformer models are able to generalize better by doing a similar task (i.e., clustering) with unpaired examples from different modalities in a multi-task fashion.
PDF Accepted to NeurIPS 2022
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