# GCL: Gradient-Guided Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation with Multi-Perspective Meta Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08888 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08888/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04592/) (2020)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [Hard Negative Mixing for Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01028/) (2020)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00224/) (2020)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [Propagate Yourself: Exploring Pixel-Level Consistency for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10043/) (2020)
- [Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11939/) (2021)
- [Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05874/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning from a Class-wise Memory Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13415/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning with Stronger Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07713/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06985/) (2020)

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

- [GuidedNet: Semi-Supervised Multi-Organ Segmentation via Labeled Data Guide Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04914/) (2024)
- [AI-Enhanced Virtual Reality in Medicine: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03093/) (2024)
- [TeleOR: Real-time Telemedicine System for Full-Scene Operating Room](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19763/) (2024)
- [VCDP: Variation-Conditioned Distributional Proxy Learning for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07416/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since annotating medical images for segmentation tasks commonly incurs expensive costs, it is highly desirable to design an annotation-efficient method to alleviate the annotation burden. Recently, contrastive learning has exhibited a great potential in learning robust representations to boost downstream tasks with limited labels. In medical imaging scenarios, ready-made meta labels (i.e., specific attribute information of medical images) inherently reveal semantic relationships among images, which have been used to define positive pairs in previous work. However, the multi-perspective semantics revealed by various meta labels are usually incompatible and can incur intractable "semantic contradiction" when combining different meta labels. In this paper, we tackle the issue of "semantic contradiction" in a gradient-guided manner using our proposed Gradient Mitigator method, which systematically unifies multi-perspective meta labels to enable a pre-trained model to attain a better high-level semantic recognition ability. Moreover, we emphasize that the fine-grained discrimination ability is vital for segmentation-oriented pre-training, and develop a novel method called Gradient Filter to dynamically screen pixel pairs with the most discriminating power based on the magnitude of gradients. Comprehensive experiments on four medical image segmentation datasets verify that our new method GCL: (1) learns informative image representations and considerably boosts segmentation performance with limited labels, and (2) shows promising generalizability on out-of-distribution datasets.