# AlphaRAD: Grounded Zero-Shot Classification in Chest Radiology via α-Corrected Binary Cross Entropy and Factorized Latent Supervision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01757 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01757/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 32 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14119/) (2020)
- [RadGraph: Extracting Clinical Entities and Relations from Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14463/) (2021)
- [PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07441/) (2019)
- [Learning to Exploit Temporal Structure for Biomedical Vision-Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04558/) (2023)
- [Can AI help in screening Viral and COVID-19 pneumonia?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13145/) (2020)
- [MedKLIP: Medical Knowledge Enhanced Language-Image Pre-Training in Radiology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02228/) (2023)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Visual-Language Pre-training on Chest Radiology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14042/) (2023)
- [Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Patch Aligned Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04994/) (2022)
- [CheXpert Plus: Augmenting a Large Chest X-ray Dataset with Text Radiology Reports, Patient Demographics and Additional Image Formats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19538/) (2024)
- [CXR-CLIP: Toward Large Scale Chest X-ray Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13292/) (2023)
- [DINOv2 Meets Text: A Unified Framework for Image- and Pixel-Level Vision-Language Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16334/) (2024)
- [UniCLIP: Unified Framework for Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13430/) (2022)
- [CARZero: Cross-Attention Alignment for Radiology Zero-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17417/) (2024)
- [ChestX-Det10: Chest X-ray Dataset on Detection of Thoracic Abnormalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10550/) (2020)
- [PadChest-GR: A Bilingual Chest X-ray Dataset for Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05085/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Representation in Radiography-Reports Foundation Model: A Granular Alignment Algorithm Using Masked Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05904/) (2023)
- [Learning to diagnose from scratch by exploiting dependencies among labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10501/) (2017)
- [COVID-19 Infection Map Generation and Detection from Chest X-Ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12698/) (2020)
- [Decomposing Disease Descriptions for Enhanced Pathology Detection: A Multi-Aspect Vision-Language Pre-training Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07636/) (2024)
- [UniChest: Conquer-and-Divide Pre-training for Multi-Source Chest X-Ray Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11038/) (2023)
- [A Simple Interpretable Transformer for Fine-Grained Image Classification and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04157/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Pretrained Models (VLPMs) offer a scalable path to open-vocabulary chest radiology understanding, yet two aspects remain underexplored: how structured clinical semantics extracted from medical reports can reduce in-batch noise during contrastive learning, and how cross-modal fusion can be designed to produce more faithful spatial grounding without added complexity. We introduce AlphaRAD, addressing these opportunities through two contributions. First, we construct a large-scale structured medical concept space from medical reports parsed by a Large Language Model for training, thereby mitigating in-batch learning noise and removing heuristic pair matching in contrastive learning, and thus naturally positioning AlphaRAD as a medical concept discriminator trained via α-Corrected Binary Cross-Entropy. Second, we propose FLaS (Factorized Latent Supervision), an extremely simple yet effective cross-modal feature fusion module that factorizes VLPM representations into independent subspaces, using dedicated alignment supervision to enhance the expressiveness of spatial grounding without introducing additional model parameters. Through extensive empirical validation, AlphaRAD shows strong zero-shot generalization across diverse chest radiology tasks. Notably, it establishes state-of-the-art average performance across 16 classification benchmarks, while achieving individual state-of-the-art results via distinct gains on 7 grounding/phrase grounding and 3 segmentation datasets.