Rethinking Contrastive Targets in Radiology Language-Image Pretraining

CLIP-style contrastive image–text pretraining is widely used in radiology data, where each image is paired with one report and every other report in the batch is treated as a negative. Under this recipe, two failures appear, neither systematically addressed by existing contrastive learning theory: zero-shot evaluation peaks then degrades while training loss keeps decreasing, and training fails to learn at all at large batches. We hypothesize the cause is structural rather than radiology-specific: many unpaired reports share clinical findings with a given image, so CLIP's paired-identity target is systematically biased, not merely noisy. To test this, we construct CLEVR-Radiology, a synthetic testbed that preserves only this overlapping-fact structure and reproduces both failures. With evidence that the structure is sufficient to reproduce the failures, we develop a target-misspecification theory that derives both failures from a single deterministic gradient bias amplified by batch size, and use it to motivate a minimal compatibility-based correction, CorLIP: a text is treated as positive whenever its clinical assertions agree with the image, with no other change to the training pipeline. Beyond benchmark improvements, CorLIP removes the post-peak degradation, makes large-batch training succeed where it previously collapsed, substantially amplifies the gains from more data, and is the only configuration that remains stable up to B=2048. The correction also transfers from chest X-ray to 3D CT modalities.