# Stronger is not better: Better Augmentations in Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05992/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [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)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [Kvasir-SEG: A Segmented Polyp Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07069/) (2019)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [Propagate Yourself: Exploring Pixel-Level Consistency for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10043/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)
- [Not-so-supervised: a survey of semi-supervised, multi-instance, and transfer learning in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06353/) (2018)
- [Comparing to Learn: Surpassing ImageNet Pretraining on Radiographs By Comparing Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07423/) (2020)
- [FocalMix: Semi-Supervised Learning for 3D Medical Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09108/) (2020)
- [SCNet: Enhancing Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation by Self-Contrastive Background Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09216/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised contrastive learning is among the recent representation learning methods that have shown performance gains in several downstream tasks including semantic segmentation. This paper evaluates strong data augmentation, one of the most important components for self-supervised contrastive learning's improved performance. Strong data augmentation involves applying the composition of multiple augmentation techniques on images. Surprisingly, we find that the existing data augmentations do not always improve performance for semantic segmentation for medical images. We experiment with other augmentations that provide improved performance.