ProtoCLIP: Prototype-Aligned Latent Refinement for Robust Zero-Shot Chest X-Ray Classification

arXiv:2604.18444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for chest radiograph classification, but their performance is often limited by confounding label co-occurrence, long-tail class imbalance, and transfer instability under domain shift. We propose ProtoCLIP, a refinement strategy for CLIP-style VLMs that improves zero-shot discrimination through targeted data curation and distilled anchor alignment. Specifically, we construct pathology-focu