SCCL-DT: Semantic-Conflict-Aware Contrastive Learning with Dual-Rule Teacher Distillation for Zero-Shot Chest X-Ray Diagnosis

Abstract

Contrastive vision-language pre-training supports zero-shot chest X-ray diagnosis, but standard objectives treat every off-diagonal image-report pair in a batch as a negative. In radiology, recurring findings across patients mean that instance mismatch need not imply semantic incompatibility, creating false-negative supervision that we term a semantic conflict. A training-trace audit shows that pair-observations selected by the online mask used during training are enriched for report-derived finding agreement, although this proxy analysis does not establish clinical equivalence. Fixed thresholds can become miscalibrated as similarity distributions evolve, while soft reweighting leaves residual repulsive gradients. We therefore propose Semantic-Conflict-Aware Contrastive Learning (SCCL), which tracks modality-specific similarity distributions with exponential-moving-average (EMA) statistics, derives adaptive thresholds, and hard-masks flagged candidates before softmax normalization. Inclusive (OR) and consensus (AND) rules define two SCCL teachers, whose bidirectional cross-modal rankings are consolidated through standard distillation into a single deployable student, SCCL-DT. Across five public chest X-ray benchmarks, SCCL-DT achieves a mean zero-shot AUC of $0.850$, compared with $0.837$ for the strongest evaluated baseline in our comparison. Code will be made publicly available soon.