Code and Pixels: Multi-Modal Contrastive Pre-training for Enhanced Tabular Data Analysis

Learning from tabular data is of paramount importance, as it complements the conventional analysis of image and video data by providing a rich source of structured information that is often critical for comprehensive understanding and decision-making processes. We present Multi-task Contrastive Masked Tabular Modeling (MT-CMTM), a novel method aiming to enhance tabular models by leveraging the correlation between tabular data and corresponding images. MT-CMTM employs a dual strategy combining contrastive learning with masked tabular modeling, optimizing the synergy between these data modalities. Central to our approach is a 1D Convolutional Neural Network with residual connections and an attention mechanism (1D-ResNet-CBAM), designed to efficiently process tabular data without relying on images. This enables MT-CMTM to handle purely tabular data for downstream tasks, eliminating the need for potentially costly image acquisition and processing. We evaluated MT-CMTM on the DVM car dataset, which is uniquely suited for this particular scenario, and the newly developed HIPMP dataset, which connects membrane fabrication parameters with image data. Our MT-CMTM model outperforms the proposed tabular 1D-ResNet-CBAM, which is trained from scratch, achieving a relative 1.48% improvement in relative MSE on HIPMP and a 2.38% increase in absolute accuracy on DVM. These results demonstrate MT-CMTM's robustness and its potential to advance the field of multi-modal learning.

Embarrassingly Simple Scribble Supervision for 3D Medical Segmentation

Traditionally, segmentation algorithms require dense annotations for training, demanding significant annotation efforts, particularly within the 3D medical imaging field. Scribble-supervised learning emerges as a possible solution to this challenge, promising a reduction in annotation efforts when creating large-scale datasets. Recently, a plethora of methods for optimized learning from scribbles have been proposed, but have so far failed to position scribble annotation as a beneficial alternative. We relate this shortcoming to two major issues: 1) the complex nature of many methods which deeply ties them to the underlying segmentation model, thus preventing a migration to more powerful state-of-the-art models as the field progresses and 2) the lack of a systematic evaluation to validate consistent performance across the broader medical domain, resulting in a lack of trust when applying these methods to new segmentation problems. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive scribble supervision benchmark consisting of seven datasets covering a diverse set of anatomies and pathologies imaged with varying modalities. We furthermore propose the systematic use of partial losses, i.e. losses that are only computed on annotated voxels. Contrary to most existing methods, these losses can be seamlessly integrated into state-of-the-art segmentation methods, enabling them to learn from scribble annotations while preserving their original loss formulations. Our evaluation using nnU-Net reveals that while most existing methods suffer from a lack of generalization, the proposed approach consistently delivers state-of-the-art performance. Thanks to its simplicity, our approach presents an embarrassingly simple yet effective solution to the challenges of scribble supervision. Source code as well as our extensive scribble benchmarking suite will be made publicly available upon publication.