# FaNe: Towards Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Contrast with False-Negative Reduction and Text-Conditioned Sparse Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12215 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12215/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 22 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Medical vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/medical-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07042/) (2019)
- [COVID-Net: A Tailored Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design for Detection of COVID-19 Cases from Chest X-Ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09871/) (2020)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Visual-Language Pre-training on Chest Radiology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14042/) (2023)
- [SoftCLIP: Softer Cross-modal Alignment Makes CLIP Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17561/) (2023)
- [PRIOR: Prototype Representation Joint Learning from Medical Images and Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12577/) (2023)
- [FLAIR: VLM with Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03561/) (2024)
- [M-FLAG: Medical Vision-Language Pre-training with Frozen Language Models and Latent Space Geometry Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08347/) (2023)
- [CARZero: Cross-Attention Alignment for Radiology Zero-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17417/) (2024)
- [Fine-Grained Image-Text Alignment in Medical Imaging Enables Explainable Cyclic Image-Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08078/) (2023)
- [IMITATE: Clinical Prior Guided Hierarchical Vision-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07355/) (2023)
- [MLIP: Enhancing Medical Visual Representation with Divergence Encoder and Knowledge-guided Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02045/) (2024)
- [MedUnifier: Unifying Vision-and-Language Pre-training on Medical Data with Vision Generation Task using Discrete Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01019/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PLRS-IC: A Dual-Calibration Framework for Chest X-Ray Vision-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39266/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical vision-language pre-training (VLP) offers significant potential for advancing medical image understanding by leveraging paired image-report data. However, existing methods are limited by Fa}lse Negatives (FaNe) induced by semantically similar texts and insufficient fine-grained cross-modal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose FaNe, a semantic-enhanced VLP framework. To mitigate false negatives, we introduce a semantic-aware positive pair mining strategy based on text-text similarity with adaptive normalization. Furthermore, we design a text-conditioned sparse attention pooling module to enable fine-grained image-text alignment through localized visual representations guided by textual cues. To strengthen intra-modal discrimination, we develop a hard-negative aware contrastive loss that adaptively reweights semantically similar negatives. Extensive experiments on five downstream medical imaging benchmarks demonstrate that FaNe achieves state-of-the-art performance across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, validating the effectiveness of our framework.