# Learning Better Contrastive View from Radiologist's Gaze

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08826 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08826/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [On Variational Bounds of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06922/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05224/) (2021)
- [What Should Not Be Contrastive in Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05659/) (2020)
- [Patches Are All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09792/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning is Robust to Massive Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10694/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Feature Attention Network for Saliency detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00179/) (2019)
- [Comparing to Learn: Surpassing ImageNet Pretraining on Radiographs By Comparing Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07423/) (2020)
- [Pushing the limits of self-supervised ResNets: Can we outperform supervised learning without labels on ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05119/) (2022)
- [Crafting Better Contrastive Views for Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03278/) (2022)
- [Equivariant Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00899/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Gaze-DETR: Using Expert Gaze to Reduce False Positives in Vulvovaginal Candidiasis Screening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09463/) (2024)
- [When Eye-Tracking Meets Machine Learning: A Systematic Review on Applications in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07834/) (2024)
- [From Spatial Semantics to Temporal Context: Leveraging Gaze Trajectory for Weakly Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26542/) (2026)
- [Learning Molecular Representations from Cellular Phenotypes with Structure Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02688/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent self-supervised contrastive learning methods greatly benefit from the Siamese structure that aims to minimizing distances between positive pairs. These methods usually apply random data augmentation to input images, expecting the augmented views of the same images to be similar and positively paired. However, random augmentation may overlook image semantic information and degrade the quality of augmented views in contrastive learning. This issue becomes more challenging in medical images since the abnormalities related to diseases can be tiny, and are easy to be corrupted (e.g., being cropped out) in the current scheme of random augmentation. In this work, we first demonstrate that, for widely-used X-ray images, the conventional augmentation prevalent in contrastive pre-training can affect the performance of the downstream diagnosis or classification tasks. Then, we propose a novel augmentation method, i.e., FocusContrast, to learn from radiologists' gaze in diagnosis and generate contrastive views for medical images with guidance from radiologists' visual attention. Specifically, we track the gaze movement of radiologists and model their visual attention when reading to diagnose X-ray images. The learned model can predict visual attention of the radiologists given a new input image, and further guide the attention-aware augmentation that hardly neglects the disease-related abnormalities. As a plug-and-play and framework-agnostic module, FocusContrast consistently improves state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods of SimCLR, MoCo, and BYOL by 4.0~7.0% in classification accuracy on a knee X-ray dataset.