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MedKCO: Medical Vision-Language Pretraining via Knowledge-Driven Cognitive Orchestration

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • MedKCO introduces a novel medical vision-language pretraining approach that improves generalization by ordering pretraining data through a knowledge-driven cognitive orchestration process.
  • The method incorporates a two-level curriculum based on diagnostic sensitivity and intra-class sample representativeness to better structure the training sequence.
  • A self-paced asymmetric contrastive loss is designed to handle inter-class similarity dynamically, enhancing contrastive learning performance.
  • Extensive experiments across multiple medical imaging tasks demonstrate that MedKCO significantly outperforms existing medical vision-language pretraining baselines.
  • The approach addresses limitations of current VLP models that attempt to learn simple and complex concepts simultaneously, causing suboptimal feature representation under distribution shifts.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09101 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:MedKCO: Medical Vision-Language Pretraining via Knowledge-Driven Cognitive Orchestration

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Abstract:Medical vision-language pretraining (VLP) models have recently been investigated for their generalization to diverse downstream tasks. However, current medical VLP methods typically force the model to learn simple and complex concepts simultaneously. This anti-cognitive process leads to suboptimal feature representations, especially under distribution shift. To address this limitation, we propose a Knowledge-driven Cognitive Orchestration for Medical VLP (MedKCO) that involves both the ordering of the pretraining data and the learning objective of vision-language contrast. Specifically, we design a two level curriculum by incorporating diagnostic sensitivity and intra-class sample representativeness for the ordering of the pretraining data. Moreover, considering the inter-class similarity of medical images, we introduce a self-paced asymmetric contrastive loss to dynamically adjust the participation of the pretraining objective. We evaluate the proposed pretraining method on three medical imaging scenarios in multiple vision-language downstream tasks, and compare it with several curriculum learning methods. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly surpasses all baselines. this https URL.
Comments:
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09101 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09101v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09101
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Chenran Zhang [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 02:22:12 UTC (3,059 KB)
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