Anton Wiehe


2022

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Language over Labels: Contrastive Language Supervision Exceeds Purely Label-Supervised Classification Performance on Chest X-Rays
Anton Wiehe | Florian Schneider | Sebastian Blank | Xintong Wang | Hans-Peter Zorn | Christian Biemann
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop

The multi-modal foundation model CLIP computes representations from texts and images that achieved unprecedented performance on tasks such as zero-shot image classification. However, CLIP was pretrained on public internet data. Thus it lacks highly domain-specific knowledge. We investigate the adaptation of CLIP-based models to the chest radiography domain using the MIMIC-CXR dataset. We show that the features of the pretrained CLIP models do not transfer to this domain. We adapt CLIP to the chest radiography domain using contrastive language supervision and show that this approach yields a model that outperforms supervised learning on labels on the MIMIC-CXR dataset while also generalizing to the CheXpert and RSNA Pneumonia datasets. Furthermore, we do a detailed ablation study of the batch and dataset size. Finally, we show that language supervision allows for better explainability by using the multi-modal model to generate images from texts such that experts can inspect what the model has learned.