Vision-language contrastive pretraining has become the dominant recipe for 3D medical foundation models, leveraging the large volumes of paired scans and reports produced in clinical practice. However, medical images usually span dozens of organs, and radiological reports are much longer than typical natural image captions and are composed of multiple structured sections. CLIP-style pretraining compresses this structure by encoding each modality into a single global token, at the risk of losing important details. We introduce ConQuer (Concept Queries), an image-text pretraining method that augments CLIP's global alignment with a set of localized alignments, one per concept. ConQuer splits the report into concept-specific sections and learns cross-attention queries that pool the matching image features without using any segmentation mask or spatial supervision. Contrastive learning is then applied independently for each concept. Concepts can be any unit of semantic localization; here, they are anatomical regions, one query per organ or gross body region. As a byproduct, each query learns attention maps focused on its concept, providing built-in spatial interpretability. We use ConQuer to train Jolia, a 3D CT foundation model on chest and abdominal CT. Jolia consistently outperforms a CLIP baseline on findings classification, report generation, and cross-center transfer, and sets a new state of the art across multiple public benchmarks. Jolia's weights will be released upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24570
While point cloud foundation models have significantly advanced point cloud video understanding, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods still suffer from two critical limitations: prohibitive annotation costs for large-scale point cloud datasets and severe memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we aim to mine richer supervision signals from existing data rather than blindly scaling datasets. A further key principle is that the memory footprint of fine-tuning must be drastically reduced compared to full fine-tuning, which remains elusive for current PEFT techniques. Driven by these challenges, we identify three core desiderata: data-, parameter-, and memory efficiency, and present PoinTriE, a unified framework that excels along all three dimensions. For pre-training, pseudo-motion trajectories are synthesized via rigid transformations, paired with text corpora and 2D projections derived from raw point clouds. We then propose a Geometric-Motion Duality Network optimized via multimodal contrastive learning, rigid rotation prediction, and motion distribution divergence to produce dense self-supervision. During fine-tuning, we freeze the pretrained backbone and only update a lightweight Spatio-temporal Side Network built with LoRA units. Equipped with a gradient flow masking strategy, PoinTriE simultaneously reduces memory consumption and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments confirm that PoinTriE establishes new state-of-the-art results on action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24175
Purpose: To evaluate the feasibility and challenges of heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT scans using contrastive unpaired image translation and deep learning-based segmentation. Approach: We developed ChameleonNet, a framework utilizing the Contrastive Unpaired Translation (CUT) network with decoupled contrastive learning (DCL) loss to synthesize non-contrast CT from contrast CT scans. Using annotations of four heart chambers (left atrium (LA), left ventricle (LV), right atrium (RA), and right ventricle (RV)) from contrast scans, we trained a Hausdorff distance loss-enhanced nnU-Net on synthesized non-contrast images. The translation model was trained with 35,538 contrast-enhanced and 37,197 non-contrast CT slices. The segmentation model was trained with 292 synthesized non-contrast scans. Performance was evaluated using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th Hausdorff distance (HD95) on 36 synthesized non-contrast scans, and volume agreement on 36 real non-contrast CT scans was assessed using Pearson correlation, mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and mean percentage error (MPE). Results: The segmentation model achieved DSC of 0.94 (0.01), 0.91 (0.04), 0.92 (0.03), 0.93 (0.02), and HD95 of 3.63 (1.49), 5.74 (4.08), 5.18 (1.77), 5.51 (3.21) mm on synthesized non-contrast images for LA, LV, RA, and RV, respectively. On real non-contrast CT scans, Pearson correlations were 0.93, 0.82, 0.87, and 0.89 (all p<0.001), with MAPE ranging from 9.22% to 20.79%, and MPE ranging from -12.52% to 4.67%. Conclusions: ChameleonNet demonstrated feasibility for heart chamber segmentation from non-contrast CT without manual non-contrast annotations. However, volume errors, particularly for LV and RV, indicate that further refinement and validation are needed before clinical use.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23879
Graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at aggregating neighbor information for classification, yet their performance is hindered by graph structural entanglement, where spurious correlations from semantically irrelevant neighbors contaminate node embeddings. This challenge is most acute for nodes near class boundaries in the embedding space, where amplified structural noise blurs decision boundaries and destabilizes predictions. Existing robust GNN methods largely treat all nodes uniformly, ignoring boundary vulnerabilities. In this paper, to improve classification performance, we tackle graph structural disentanglement by identifying boundary-region entanglement as the primary bottleneck and propose Boundary Embedding Shaping (BES), an adaptive contrastive learning GNN plug-in module that selectively suppresses spurious structural noise at decision boundaries with minimal model parameter perturbation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BES consistently improves boundary discrimination and outperforms existing leading methods. Notably, BES boosts GCN performance by an average of 3.3% in node classification (up to 5.0% on WikiCS) and achieves superior accuracy in link prediction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20283
Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR). However, previous works have ignored the grain blindness when adapting the contrastive paradigm into retrieval tasks. Grain blindness refers to the tendency of the model to overlook grain-level information contained in the query, which is crucial for effectively handling complex queries. This stems from contrastive learning treating samples as a binary classification (positive/negative), while ignoring the different information carried by each negative sample. To address this, we argue that negatives should be treated differently according to their similarity to the positive sample, enabling the model to learn distinct grain information from each negative. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective framework, called ELVA, a novel rule-based RL framework that mitigates grain blindness through ranking-driven MLLMs. 1) Instead of relying on reward models, we extend Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to retrieval tasks, allowing the model to explore new ranking behaviors without explicit ranking labels. 2) By utilizing rule-based rewards, our approach jointly optimizes the ranking of negative samples while enlarging the similarity gap between positive and negative. To more precisely measure grain blindness, we further introduce MRBench, a new benchmark specifically designed for multi-grain query scenarios. ELVA achieves state-of-the-art results across standard retrieval benchmarks, and its notable 13.1% improvement on MRBench further demonstrates its effectiveness in alleviating grain blindness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20280
\noindent\textbf{Background and Objective:} Speech has emerged as a low-cost and non-invasive digital biomarker with considerable potential for cognitive impairment detection. However, limited labeled data and cross-dataset variability remain major challenges for robust speech-based screening systems. \par\noindent\textbf{Methods:} We developed a segment-level representation learning framework for speech-based cognitive impairment detection. Speech recordings were divided into short segments and converted into spectrogram representations. To improve robustness under limited-data conditions, offline and online augmentation strategies were combined with autoencoder-based representation learning and contrastive objectives to enhance discriminative latent representations. \par\noindent\textbf{Results:} Experiments conducted on four independent Mandarin Chinese speech datasets demonstrated stable and competitive performance in both binary and three-class classification tasks, with particularly notable improvements in the clinically challenging three-class setting. Ablation studies further supported the effectiveness of the proposed framework. \par\noindent\textbf{Conclusions:} The findings suggest that segment-level speech representation learning may provide a scalable and practical approach for cognitive impairment screening in resource-constrained clinical settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19996
Scaling robot policy learning for autonomous surgery is challenging, as expert demonstrations are expensive and in vivo exploration poses substantial safety risks. Surgical world models address this by generating realistic, action-conditioned future frames from an initial observation, but existing methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: spatial interaction incoherence, where visible instrument contact fails to induce spatially consistent tissue deformation, and temporal fidelity collapse, where prediction errors compound across autoregressive rollouts and progressively corrupt visual quality. We present SurgVista, a surgical world model that mitigates both failures through two training recipes. Deformation Consistency Regularization extracts scene-point trajectories from training videos and enforces cross-frame coherence through latent contrastive learning, strengthening physically consistent instrument-tissue dynamics. Drift Adaptation Training mitigates long-horizon drift by perturbing conditioning frames with online prediction residuals and photometric augmentations calibrated to long-horizon drift statistics, sustaining visual fidelity over extended rollouts. To enable rigorous evaluation, we further introduce SurgWorld-Bench, featuring diverse procedure types, long-range rollouts, and decoupled metrics for instrument-motion accuracy and tissue-response fidelity. Extensive experiments show that SurgVista consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across visual quality, temporal consistency, and interaction fidelity, with gains widening as the prediction horizon grows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19889
Modeling long-sequence medical time series data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG), poses significant challenges due to high sampling rates, multichannel signal complexity, inherent noise, and limited labeled data. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, based on various encoder architectures such as convolutional neural networks, have been proposed to learn representations from unlabeled data, they often fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and noise-invariant features. Structured state space models (S4) excel at long-sequence modeling, but existing S4 architectures fail to capture the unique characteristics of multichannel physiological waveforms. In this work, we propose SL-S4Wave, a self-supervised learning framework that combines contrastive learning with a tailored encoder built on structured state space models. The encoder incorporates multi-layer global convolution using multiscale subkernels, enabling the capture of both fine-grained local patterns and long-range temporal dependencies in noisy, high-resolution multichannel waveforms. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SL-S4Wave (1) consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines in a challenging arrhythmia detection task, (2) achieves high performance with significantly fewer labeled examples, showcasing strong label efficiency, and (3) maintains robust performance on long waveform segments, highlighting its capacity to model complex temporal dynamics in long sequences that most existing approaches fail to efficiently model, and (4) transfers effectively to unseen arrhythmia types, underscoring its robust cross-domain generalization. We additionally evaluate SL-S4Wave on multiple EEG tasks, achieving superior performance over strong baselines, demonstrating generalizability of our approach beyond cardiac waveforms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19888
Composed image retrieval retrieves a target image using a composed query of a reference image and a modified text description. In the fashion domain, this task requires understanding subtle attribute variations such as color, pattern, and texture. However, existing approaches face limitations due to scarce annotated data and simplistic negative sampling. We propose a novel framework that integrates a multi-modal large language model (LLaVA) to generate attribute-aware triplets and introduces a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance contrastive learning. We leverage pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP-ViT/B32, to generate and concatenate sentence-level prompts with the relative caption and to scale the number of negatives using static representations. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced compositional reasoning and improved fine-grained retrieval behavior, underscoring the feasibility and potential of the proposed framework for fashion retrieval.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19684
The retina offers a noninvasive window into neurodegenerative disease, capturing subtle structural patterns associated with a risk of future cognitive decline. Vision-language alignment frameworks such as REVEAL have shown that pairing retinal fundus images with structured clinical risk narratives improves early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A key design choice in these approaches is the use of phenotypic grouping, where individuals with similar risk profiles are treated as multi-positive pairs during contrastive learning. However, existing methods operationalize phenotypic similarity as a discrete construct, relying on hard group assignments that impose rigid supervision and decouple group formation from representation learning. We propose a continuous formulation of phenotypic structure within contrastive learning. Rather than assigning samples to fixed clusters, we model inter-subject similarity as a differentiable weighting function derived from intra-modality embedding similarities in both retinal images and risk profiles. These weights define soft multi-positive relationships through a continuous aggregation operator, enabling graded supervision that reflects the spectrum nature of disease risk. We further introduce a soft-target contrastive objective that jointly learns cross-modal alignment and phenotypic structure in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on UK Biobank retinal imaging data for incident AD prediction, the proposed framework consistently outperforms discrete group-based contrastive learning and standard vision-language baselines. By treating phenotypic similarity as a learnable, continuous signal rather than a fixed grouping rule, our approach provides a principled and robust foundation for population-scale neurodegenerative risk modeling from multi-modal retinal and clinical data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19522
In recent years, credit card fraud detection has faced significant challenges due to highly imbalanced data, evolving fraud patterns, and complex relational structures among transaction entities. To address these issues, this research proposes a novel framework called Timeaware Multi Relational Guided Graph Neural Network (TMR GGNN). Particularly, the proposed TMR GGNN extends the encoder decoder Graph Neural Network GNN architecture by modeling heterogeneous interactions across customers, merchants, devices, and IPs over temporal windows. Subsequently, the proposed TMR GGNN approach constructs a dynamic, multi relational graph and incorporates a time aware relational attention mechanism within the encoder to adaptively weigh the transaction relevance based on temporal proximity and semantic context. Consequently, the decoder employs a contrastive learning module to distinguish between real and synthesized transaction patterns, while improving the models generalization of rare fraud cases. Additionally, to effectively manage severe class imbalances and emphasize discriminative learning, a composite loss function combining Information Noise Contrastive Estimation (InfoNCE) based contrastive loss with Focal Loss is introduced. This integration assists in improving fraud identification while mitigating false negatives.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18444
Trajectory similarity is a fundamental task in analyzing mobility patterns, essential for applications such as route pattern extraction, mobility prediction, and anomaly detection. Traditional distance-based measures for computing similarity incur high computational cost, driving the adoption of lightweight learning-based approaches. Supervised methods rely on extensive labels derived from traditional distance measures and often reproduce these metrics, which limits generalization. While self-supervised learning addresses this issue through contrastive learning, it lacks a unified framework, making it difficult to compare deep learning (DL) models for consistent trajectory representation. Accordingly, this paper presents MoCo-AIS, a unified framework for learning vessel trajectory embeddings based on the Momentum Contrast (MoCo) paradigm, which formulates similarity learning through positive and negative trajectory pairs. Within this framework, we evaluate a diverse set of leading DL models on large-scale, real-world vessel-tracking AIS datasets that capture diverse navigation behaviors and operating conditions. Results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves similarity learning over existing baselines, while providing a benchmarking platform for evaluating trajectory representation models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17978
Speech foundation models, pre-trained on large corpora of unlabelled speech data, produce general-purpose representations which are useful across tasks. However, these representations encode information about salient speech variables in a distributed manner, while downstream speech tasks rely on only some of this variability. In this work, we propose a post-training refinement approach using interventional contrastive learning. By leveraging an interventional dataset and multi-part contrastive loss, we learn a transformation from the entangled representation space of speech foundation models into separate content and speaker subspaces. We evaluate the learnt representations on speaker verification and keyword spotting tasks, showing improved out-of-domain speaker verification performance and evidence that speaker and content information are separated across the learned subspaces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17967
Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17664
Unsupervised 3D seismic horizon tracking faces a key limitation: signal-based propagators provide accurate trace-level alignment but often fail near faults, whereas texture-driven deep models are more robust to discontinuities, typically at the cost of labeled data requirements and reduced trace-level precision. We propose a self-supervised fusion of both paradigms in which signal-derived local horizon correspondences act as domain-specific priors to train a texture-based deep learning model. Specifically, we estimate reliable trace-to-trace flows from reflector slopes and use them to form positive pairs in a contrastive objective, while restricting training to high-confidence neighborhoods, optionally augmented with a fault mask. The objective is not to infer ambiguous correspondences close to discontinuities, but to preserve horizon identity across them. As a result, the network learns voxel-wise embeddings that preserve local signal continuity while enabling horizon propagation beyond discontinuities through similarity search. Experiments on the public F3 dataset and a faulted synthetic dataset achieve lower mean absolute error (MAE) than unsupervised baselines and competitive performance against a semi-supervised method using a single labeled slice.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16271
Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is critical for assessing retinal vascular abnormalities, but its acquisition is invasive and not always feasible. In contrast, color fundus photography (CFP) is non-invasive and widely accessible, which has motivated studies on CFP-to-FFA synthesis. However, prior works rely solely on CFP surface texture, fundamentally limiting the ability to reconstruct functional vascular information and subtle pathological changes. To address this, we propose a novel framework that synthesizes FFA from CFP with structural guidance provided by optical coherence tomography (OCT). We construct a multi-modal retinal imaging dataset with paired CFP, FFA, and OCT from 3,676 patient eyes--the first tri-modally aligned dataset in retinal imaging. To bridge the spatial gap between OCT and fundus modalities, we propose a Spatially Aligned Cross-Modal Fusion (SACMF) module that projects depth-resolved OCT features onto the fundus plane and injects them into the CFP encoder via adaptive layer normalization. Beyond feature fusion, we further introduce Token-wise Cross-Modality Alignment (TCMA), a token-level contrastive learning strategy that explicitly aligns CFP and FFA representations at corresponding spatial positions. Our method achieves superior synthesis performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that the FFA images synthesized by our approach bring greater improvements in downstream disease diagnosis performance than existing methods, highlighting the clinical potential of our approach as a non-invasive decision-support tool in routine workflows. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16234
Given their effectiveness in modeling the relational structure among network traffic flows, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). However, most existing GNN-based NIDS approaches focus on the relational structure of traffic flows, and treat them as temporally independent, which limits their ability to cope with evolving attack behaviors. Moreover, their reliance on supervised or semi-supervised learning often restricts generalization to unseen attacks. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised GNN-based framework. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is among the first self-supervised GNN-based NIDS models to explicitly leverage real timestamps, which provides faithful temporal dependencies for representation learning. We first construct a series of temporal graphs from network traffic flows according to their timestamps, and then employ an E-GraphSAGE and LSTM based encoder to fully extract temporal information and spatial dependencies of network traffic, without introducing time-costly attention mechanisms. A multi-view graph contrastive learning (GCL) scheme is introduced, where temporal, spatial, and feature contrasts are jointly performed to capture temporal continuity, preserve structural consistency, and improve the generalization and robustness of the learned representations, respectively. In addition, a gradient-norm-based adaptive weighting strategy is designed to optimize the contrastive loss weights. Experimental results on four representative NIDS datasets with real timestamps demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing self-supervised approaches and achieves performance comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art GNN method, while maintaining high computational efficiency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17109
We present our approach to SemEval 2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Our solution uses contrastive learning with fine-tuned sentence transformers to capture narrative similarity across abstract themes, course of action, and outcomes. We develop two pipelines: (Track A) a single-view method that encodes full narratives with smart layer freezing to reduce overfitting, and (Track B) a multi-view method that models theme, plot, and outcome with view-specific projection heads and self-supervised alignment. Both pipelines build on sentence-transformers models and are trained with contrastive loss on synthetic data. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15783
Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at this http URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15527
Glioma grading and survival prediction require the integration of heterogeneous information collected at different spatial and biological scales. Histopathology describes tissue morphology, mRNA expression captures molecular activity, and magnetic resonance imaging provides a non-invasive view of tumor extent and radiological heterogeneity. Existing glioma prognosis models often combine only two of these sources, while their alignment objectives remain mostly pairwise. This paper introduces GLORIA, a novel trimodal framework for GLioma Omics - Radiology - hIstopathology Alignment. GLORIA processes whole-slide image regions, gene-expression profiles, and 3D MRI volumes through modality-specific encoders, projects them into a shared latent space, and aligns them with a Gramian contrastive loss that measures the volume spanned by the three modality embeddings. The aligned representations are fused through a cross-modal gating module and optimized jointly for three-class glioma grading and overall survival prediction. We evaluate GLORIA on a matched TCGA-GBM/LGG and BraTS21 cohort, comprising 132 patients with all three modalities. On the shared trimodal test set, GLORIA improves over the bimodal WSI-mRNA baseline in all the metrics considered.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14568