HYDEN: Hyperbolic Density Representations for Medical Images and Reports

Zhi Qiao, Linbin Han, Xiantong Zhen, Jiahong Gao, Zhen Qian


Abstract
In light of the inherent entailment relations between images and text, embedding point vectors in hyperbolic space has been employed to leverage its hierarchical modeling advantages for visual semantic representation learning. However, point vector embeddings struggle to address semantic uncertainty, where an image may have multiple interpretations, and text may correspond to different images—a challenge especially prevalent in the medical domain. Therefor, we propose HYDEN, a novel hyperbolic density embedding based image-text representation learning approach tailored for specific medical domain data. This method integrates text-aware local features with global features from images, mapping image-text features to density features in hyperbolic space via using hyperbolic pseudo-Gaussian distributions. An encapsulation loss function is employed to model the partial order relations between image-text density distributions. Experimental results demonstrate the interpretability of our approach and its superior performance compared to the baseline methods across various zero-shot tasks and fine-tuning task on different datasets.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.420
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6285–6297
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.420/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhi Qiao, Linbin Han, Xiantong Zhen, Jiahong Gao, and Zhen Qian. 2025. HYDEN: Hyperbolic Density Representations for Medical Images and Reports. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6285–6297, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HYDEN: Hyperbolic Density Representations for Medical Images and Reports (Qiao et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.420.pdf