MaskedCLIP: Bridging the Masked and CLIP Space for Semi-Supervised Medical Vision-Language Pre-training

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhu, Lei, Zhou, Jun, Goh, Rick Siow Mong, Liu, Yong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhu, Lei
Zhou, Jun
Goh, Rick Siow Mong
Liu, Yong
author_facet Zhu, Lei
Zhou, Jun
Goh, Rick Siow Mong
Liu, Yong
contents Foundation models have recently gained tremendous popularity in medical image analysis. State-of-the-art methods leverage either paired image-text data via vision-language pre-training or unpaired image data via self-supervised pre-training to learn foundation models with generalizable image features to boost downstream task performance. However, learning foundation models exclusively on either paired or unpaired image data limits their ability to learn richer and more comprehensive image features. In this paper, we investigate a novel task termed semi-supervised vision-language pre-training, aiming to fully harness the potential of both paired and unpaired image data for foundation model learning. To this end, we propose MaskedCLIP, a synergistic masked image modeling and contrastive language-image pre-training framework for semi-supervised vision-language pre-training. The key challenge in combining paired and unpaired image data for learning a foundation model lies in the incompatible feature spaces derived from these two types of data. To address this issue, we propose to connect the masked feature space with the CLIP feature space with a bridge transformer. In this way, the more semantic specific CLIP features can benefit from the more general masked features for semantic feature extraction. We further propose a masked knowledge distillation loss to distill semantic knowledge of original image features in CLIP feature space back to the predicted masked image features in masked feature space. With this mutually interactive design, our framework effectively leverages both paired and unpaired image data to learn more generalizable image features for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on retinal image analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and data efficiency of our method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_17239
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MaskedCLIP: Bridging the Masked and CLIP Space for Semi-Supervised Medical Vision-Language Pre-training
Zhu, Lei
Zhou, Jun
Goh, Rick Siow Mong
Liu, Yong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Foundation models have recently gained tremendous popularity in medical image analysis. State-of-the-art methods leverage either paired image-text data via vision-language pre-training or unpaired image data via self-supervised pre-training to learn foundation models with generalizable image features to boost downstream task performance. However, learning foundation models exclusively on either paired or unpaired image data limits their ability to learn richer and more comprehensive image features. In this paper, we investigate a novel task termed semi-supervised vision-language pre-training, aiming to fully harness the potential of both paired and unpaired image data for foundation model learning. To this end, we propose MaskedCLIP, a synergistic masked image modeling and contrastive language-image pre-training framework for semi-supervised vision-language pre-training. The key challenge in combining paired and unpaired image data for learning a foundation model lies in the incompatible feature spaces derived from these two types of data. To address this issue, we propose to connect the masked feature space with the CLIP feature space with a bridge transformer. In this way, the more semantic specific CLIP features can benefit from the more general masked features for semantic feature extraction. We further propose a masked knowledge distillation loss to distill semantic knowledge of original image features in CLIP feature space back to the predicted masked image features in masked feature space. With this mutually interactive design, our framework effectively leverages both paired and unpaired image data to learn more generalizable image features for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on retinal image analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and data efficiency of our method.
title MaskedCLIP: Bridging the Masked and CLIP Space for Semi-Supervised Medical Vision-Language Pre-training
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17239