# MoCo-Transfer: Investigating out-of-distribution contrastive learning for limited-data domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09401 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09401/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [Transfusion: Understanding Transfer Learning for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07208/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05224/) (2021)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [Effective Data Augmentation With Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07944/) (2023)
- [GAN-based Synthetic Medical Image Augmentation for increased CNN Performance in Liver Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01229/) (2018)
- [CheXclusion: Fairness gaps in deep chest X-ray classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00827/) (2020)
- [Synthetic Data Augmentation using GAN for Improved Liver Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02385/) (2018)
- [MoCo-CXR: MoCo Pretraining Improves Representation and Transferability of Chest X-ray Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05352/) (2020)
- [CheXtransfer: Performance and Parameter Efficiency of ImageNet Models for Chest X-Ray Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06871/) (2021)
- [SinGAN-Seg: Synthetic training data generation for medical image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00471/) (2021)
- [VinDr-SpineXR: A deep learning framework for spinal lesions detection and classification from radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12930/) (2021)
- [Addressing catastrophic forgetting for medical domain expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13511/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Model Performance in Medical Datasets Over Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13426/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Accelerating Volumetric Medical Image Annotation via Short-Long Memory SAM 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01854/) (2025)
- [ContourDiff: Unpaired Medical Image Translation with Structural Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10786/) (2024)
- [LegSegNet: A Public Deep Learning System for Lower Extremity CT Tissue Segmentation and Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30829/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical imaging data is often siloed within hospitals, limiting the amount of data available for specialized model development. With limited in-domain data, one might hope to leverage larger datasets from related domains. In this paper, we analyze the benefit of transferring self-supervised contrastive representations from moment contrast (MoCo) pretraining on out-of-distribution data to settings with limited data. We consider two X-ray datasets which image different parts of the body, and compare transferring from each other to transferring from ImageNet. We find that depending on quantity of labeled and unlabeled data, contrastive pretraining on larger out-of-distribution datasets can perform nearly as well or better than MoCo pretraining in-domain, and pretraining on related domains leads to higher performance than if one were to use the ImageNet pretrained weights. Finally, we provide a preliminary way of quantifying similarity between datasets.