With the development of applications like autonomous driving, object detection has gained significant attention, while also highlighting critical vulnerabilities like backdoor attacks that severely compromise model integrity. Specifically, such attacks involve altering the categories of objects (i.e., object misclassification), removing bounding boxes (i.e., object disappearance), or generating bounding box proposals for non-existent objects (i.e., object generation) when a predefined trigger is present in the input. Although backdoor defenses for image classification are well-established, the research for object detection remains comparatively underexplored. Existing defenses address these threats by scanning outputs or models for potential backdoors but require discarding either malicious data or models. This remedy fails to enable a continuous and accurate perceptual stream for the object detection pipeline. To address such limitations, we propose ODPure, a novel input-stage black-box defense for object detection, which is based on input purification that ensures stable perception flows. Tailored to the dense prediction nature of object detectors, our Corruption-Reconstruction-Selection (CRS) paradigm operates by neutralizing triggers through a diverse portfolio of corruptions to generate a massive pool of redundant proposals, then recovering fine-grained structural cues via generative priors, and finally employing voting to reach a consensus on the resulting detections. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method provides robust defense against diverse backdoor attacks and trigger types while preserving baseline accuracy. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28239
Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have transformed computational pathology through powerful representation learning from histopathological images. PFMs provide rich, discriminative representations for whole slide image (WSI) analysis, enabling tasks such as slide-level classification under multiple instance learning (MIL). However, these representations may also encode non-biological signals associated with acquisition centers, potentially introducing spurious shortcuts into downstream predictions. In this work, we evaluate center-associated robustness in WSI classification using a controlled training setting with increasing class-center correlations quantified by Cramér's V. We benchmark six PFMs across four datasets and two MIL aggregators, while evaluating ComBat as a robustification strategy. We further introduce the Area Under the Cramér's V Curve (AUCC) to jointly capture absolute classification performance and its degradation as spurious correlation increases. Results show that center-related information encoded by PFMs propagates to WSI-level predictions, with robustness depending on both the PFM representation and MIL aggregation strategy. Additionally, ComBat harmonization does not provide consistent robustness gains across datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28231
Breast image classification requires local detail and global tissue context, yet these cues can weaken as representations deepen. We present M3D-Net, a mammography encoder that hierarchically coordinates multi-scale coordinate attention, bounded dynamic feature reuse, and differential attention through resolution-aware operator placement. Within-stage retrieval preserves access to earlier features, coordinate-aware aggregation integrates local and global context, and differential attention operates at coarse resolutions. We evaluate image-only classification on AISSLab mammography and an adapted image--clinical model on BrEaST ultrasound. Against EdgeNeXt, RepViT, and TransXNet, the proposed implementations achieve the highest recorded validation accuracy and late-training accuracy, with the lowest endpoint cross-entropy loss. Validation accuracies reach 97.78\% and 80.39\%, respectively. These results support further evaluation of hierarchical coordination across breast imaging settings; repeated-seed, component-controlled, and independent evaluations remain necessary.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27523
Accurate ground-based cloud classification is important for atmospheric monitoring, solar-energy forecasting, aviation weather assessment, and climate observation systems. However, reliable sky-image annotation is time-consuming, especially when cloud types are visually similar or mixed. We study the label efficiency of deep learning for ground-based cloud classification using the Ground-based Cloud Dataset (GCD). Rather than proposing a new architecture, we benchmark three practical strategies under limited annotation budgets: supervised transfer learning, uncertainty-based active learning, and high-confidence pseudo-labeling. An ImageNet-pretrained ResNet50 is used as a common frozen backbone, with experiments repeated over five random seeds for label budgets from $1\%$ to $100\%$ of the training labels. Supervised transfer learning is already highly label-efficient: test accuracy increases from $0.635 \pm 0.018$ with $1\%$ labels to $0.730 \pm 0.002$ with $40\%$ labels, approaching the full-label result of $0.735 \pm 0.003$. Active learning and pseudo-labeling are competitive with supervised sampling and provide small improvements for some metrics and budgets, but neither gives a large or consistent aggregate gain. Diagnostic analyses show that accepted pseudo-labels are reliable, with accuracy from $0.946$ to $0.977$, but biased toward easier high-confidence sky-type groups. In contrast, uncertainty sampling preferentially queries visually challenging groups, including Mixed and the confusable Stratocumulus and Cumulonimbus groups, but these targeted acquisitions yield only modest gains. Overall, transfer learning substantially reduces annotation requirements for GCD, while simple active and semi-supervised strategies provide limited additional benefit over a strong supervised baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26631
Accurately isolating disease-related features from confounding covariates (e.g., age, gender, site) and individual variations remains a fundamental challenge in medical image classification. Traditional regression-based approaches may ignore non-linear relations between image features and true covariates. To overcome this issue, we present a generalized Medical Imaging Disentanglement Learning (MedIDL) framework. MedIDL maps image features into three mutually orthogonal latent spaces through specialized disentanglement heads: a disease classification head guided by a supervised loss, a covariate-alignment head constrained by cross-subject similarity matching, and a Gaussian head absorbing individual variations. We evaluated our framework across 7 datasets encompassing diverse imaging modalities. MedIDL outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised classification methods in accuracy across all datasets. Association analyses demonstrate that MedIDL successfully isolates target-specific latent representations. Gradient-based interpretability mappings localize pathognomonic patterns aligning with established clinical literature.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25650
While Mamba-based models have shown strong potential for long sequence modeling, adapting them to vision is challenging due to the requirement of local neighborhood correlations and multi-directional spatial contexts for visual understanding. In this paper, we present LiAuto-MindViT, a novel hybrid vision backbone that synergizes the strengths of CNNs, Mamba, and Transformers. The core of our design is the Adaptive Bidirectional Mamba (ABM), which eliminates the directional bias of unidirectional SSMs through bidirectional selective scanning with learnable alpha blending, enabling content-adaptive directional fusion without the overhead of exhaustive multi-path routing. To further accelerate inference, we propose a deployment-friendly Reparameterized ConvSE (RepConvSE) module that leverages structural reparameterization to reduce latency and memory access overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiAuto-MindViT achieves state-of-the-art performance on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation while enabling efficient inference through reparameterization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24337
Automated grading of conjunctival photographs could reduce the cost and variability of trachoma prevalence surveys, but the relative value of modern pretrained visual representations, lightweight feature adaptation, and training-objective design has not been established under a common protocol. This study presents a controlled evaluation for binary classification of Trachomatous Inflammation-Follicular (TF) versus Normal using 1,546 images from the public UCSF/Lietman collection. Images are processed using the OPTED pipeline for zero-shot tarsal-conjunctiva segmentation, alignment, cropping, and standardization. We first compare six pretrained backbones using a common classification pipeline and then evaluate four lightweight adaptation mechanisms on DINOv2 ViT-B/14. Under stratified five-fold cross-validation, DINOv2 with Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and focal-plus-center loss achieved 91.66 +/- 0.97% accuracy, 90.69 +/- 1.10% macro-F1, and 96.06 +/- 0.71% AUC. ECA introduces only five learnable parameters while matching the performance of substantially larger alternatives. Objective ablation further showed that ECA did not consistently improve plain DINOv2 across loss functions; the lowest-variance 91.66% accuracy was obtained with cross-entropy plus center loss. Overall, the fine-tuned DINOv2 representation provided most of the predictive performance, while ECA offered a highly parameter-efficient refinement whose effect depended on the training objective. The resulting workflow provides a reproducible benchmark for active trachoma image classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23832
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are increasingly used to augment medical imaging datasets, but synthetic images do not necessarily provide downstream classification benefits. This study investigates whether class-specific Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) augmentation improves brain tumor classification when the classifier and evaluation set are held constant. Experiments were conducted on 7,200 brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans across four classes: glioma, meningioma, pituitary tumor, and no tumor. For each class, 1,400 real images were used for training and 400 were reserved for testing. A baseline Swin Transformer classifier was trained using only the real training images and compared with a second model trained using the same real images augmented with 500 DCGAN-generated images per class. Both conditions were evaluated on the identical held-out test set. The two models achieved the same overall accuracy of 96%, while macro F1 remained effectively unchanged and ROC-AUC decreased slightly from 0.987 to 0.982 after augmentation. Class-level analysis showed small redistributions in errors rather than a consistent performance gain. FID values between real and synthetic images ranged from 209.15 to 314.27, indicating substantial distributional differences under the adopted evaluation setup. These results suggest that synthetic augmentation should not be assumed to improve medical image classification and should instead be evaluated for both distributional fidelity and downstream task utility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28508
Accurate automated interpretation of electrocardio- grams (ECGs) is essential for early detection of cardiac condi- tions such as myocardial infarction and rhythm abnormalities. However, many high-performing deep learning models remain difficult to deploy in clinical settings due to limited transparency and lack of reliability validation. In this work, we present X- Beat, an explainable and reliability-aware benchmark framework for ECG image classification designed to support trustworthy AI systems in healthcare. The proposed framework combines transfer learning with post-hoc explainability and systematic reliability evaluation across four cardiac classes: Abnormal Heartbeat, History of Myocardial Infarction, Myocardial In- farction, and Normal Heartbeat. Multiple ImageNet-pretrained CNN backbones, including EfficientNet-B0, ResNet-50, DenseNet- 121, and MobileNetV3-Large, are evaluated under a unified training protocol. Beyond standard performance metrics, we incorporate Grad-CAM-based visual explanations together with additional analyses, including explanation stability, regional sen- sitivity, and confidence-based reliability assessment, to examine whether model predictions are supported by clinically meaningful evidence. Experimental results show that ResNet-50 achieves the best performance, reaching 91.94% accuracy and a macro F1- score of 0.9098, with strong class separability (AUC up to 0.995). Explanation analyses indicate that the model primarily focuses on waveform-relevant regions, while reliability evaluation suggests that most incorrect predictions occur with lower confidence. Overall, this work provides a structured and reproducible bench- mark for evaluating both predictive performance and explanation reliability in ECG image classification, contributing toward the development of trustworthy and interpretable AI components for clinical decision support systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22631
Entropy minimization is a standard objective for test-time adaptation (TTA), but it can fail in imbalanced binary segmentation. Unlike image classification, dense segmentation aggregates thousands of pixel predictions, allowing the larger predicted class to dominate the update, pull minority predictions toward itself, and produce a degenerate mask as predictions saturate and their entropy gradients vanish. We theoretically establish this collapse in a shared-shift model. This analysis motivates Balanced-Anchor Prompt Adaptation (BAPA), which combines two complementary modules. The Class-Balanced Anchors (CBA) module selects high-confidence anchors separately from each predicted class and gives foreground and background equal total loss weight, preventing the larger region from dominating the update. Dynamic Prompt Adaptation (DPA) refreshes these anchors after each prediction update and optimizes only text-side prompt residuals while keeping the vision-language encoders frozen. This prompt-only update refines the foreground-background decision boundary without altering the pretrained dense visual representation. Across experiments from four domains, BAPA achieves the highest mean Dice among the evaluated methods. Factorized ablations further validate the complementary roles of CBA and DPA, supporting balanced prompt adaptation as an effective alternative to entropy minimization for test-time binary segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21743
Multi-label few-shot learning (MLFSL) remains a significant challenge in medical image analysis (MIA). Current metric-based meta-learning methods face two critical limitations in MIA. First, conventional prototype generation often entangles irrelevant disease information, leading to contaminated prototypes and degraded performance. Second, prior studies typically enforce inter-class separability in embedding space, largely neglecting the inherent correlations among diseases. To overcome these challenges, we propose Prototype Purification and Regulation (PPR), a novel MLFSL framework for MIA. PPR first performs prototype purification by leveraging sample-level comorbidity scores to emphasize disease-specific features, producing purified prototypes that better characterize each disease. Building upon these purified prototypes, PPR further addresses the underexplored problem of inter-class prototype distance in MIA by incorporating disease-level comorbidity statistics to adaptively regulate inter-class similarity, forming a comorbidity-aware embedding space. Overall, PPR sequentially enables the model to capture pure disease features and inter-class relationships for reliable MLFSL in MIA. Extensive experiments across four chest X-ray benchmark datasets, including cross-domain evaluation, show that PPR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving disease detection while demonstrating robust generalization and clinical applicability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21541
Multi-source remote sensing image classification has attracted increasing attention due to the complementary spectral, structural, and geometric information. However, existing methods still suffer from two limitations: insufficient semantic contextual modeling and unreliable feature fusion caused by slight spatial misalignment. To address these issues, we propose a Semantic-Guided Fusion Network (SGFNet) for multi-source remote sensing image classification. Specifically, the Semantic Mixing Convolution Block (SMCB) is designed to dynamically generate semantic-aware convolution kernels according to contextual relationships among feature representations. In addition, the Frequency Modulated Fusion Block (FMFB) is introduced to perform cross-modal interaction in the frequency domain, which effectively alleviates the influence of slight spatial misalignment and improves complementary information fusion. Extensive experiments conducted on the Augsburg and Houston 2018 datasets demonstrate that the proposed SGFNet consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. The codes are publicly available at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27854
This research addresses the challenge of limited material recycling in wood recycling processes by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-based dimensionality reduction. Our study explores the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in multi-channel hyperspectral imaging (HSI), extending beyond RGB channels to over 200 spectral channels. Dimensionality reduction within this context involves streamlining the feature space for AI system training and inference. Focusing on explainable AI (XAI) methods, this paper contributes to a broader research initiative, presenting a solution framework that enhances the sustainability and efficiency of wood recycling processes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22333
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance across a range of computer vision tasks, mainly thanks to the self-attention mechanism. However, its complexity, increasing quadratically with the number of tokens, remains the major obstacle to ViT efficiency and deployment at scale. Token merging reduces this cost by aggregating redundant tokens. Yet existing methods are typically evaluated within a single architecture, leaving open whether their effectiveness stems from the merging mechanism itself or from the specific decoder they are paired with. We extend Graph-Guided Token Merging (G2TM), a single module inserted early in a ViT-based network, beyond its original Segmenter setting. We evaluate G2TM across three semantic segmentation frameworks (Segmenter, SETR, EoMT) and three decoder families (Linear, Transformer-, convolution-based), as well as standard ViT image classification. Our results show that G2TM's behavior and accuracy-efficiency trade-off are consistent across every tested architecture for a given backbone size, indicating that its effectiveness is a property of the encoder rather than the decoder. G2TM also generalizes well to image classification, achieving an even smaller degradation in accuracy compared to semantic segmentation. We further find that G2TM's optimal hyperparameters, resulting in a consistent drop in GFLOPs of 22-47% and an increase in throughput by up to 74% for segmentation models on ADE20K dataset, depend primarily on the backbone's pre-training recipe and on the target dataset, rather than on the decoder choice.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18279
Few-shot learning research is predominantly evaluated on accuracy alone, with limited attention to the parameter and training-sample budgets required to reach that accuracy - a real constraint for practitioners without large-scale compute. We present an ultra-lightweight (22,249-34,917 parameter) spatial-relational architecture for few-shot image classification that combines fixed Gabor edge-energy guidance with a windowed, content-adaptive patch locator. Under a strictly matched, iso-episode-budget protocol (250 meta-training episodes, 5 canonical seeds, 600 evaluation episodes per seed), our architecture achieves 5-shot accuracy gains, consistent across all five seeds, over Prototypical Networks, Relation Networks, and MAML on both CIFAR-FS and MiniImageNet, while using 27-53% fewer parameters than any baseline. It also converges in fewer training episodes, generalizes better to an unseen fine-grained domain (CUB-200-2011 birds, zero retraining), and is more robust to 50% occlusion and 25% spatial translation than all three baselines. A series of falsification ablations - zeroing relational tokens at inference and retraining without them entirely - shows that the architecture's pairwise relational computation, while present, is not the primary driver of its performance; the content-adaptive patch locator is. We report this honestly, together with a capacity sweep showing a genuine accuracy plateau near 22-35k parameters, and release full seed-level results and checkpoint hashes for reproducibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22323
Reference labels used to train medical image classification models are not always as certain as they may appear, and this uncertainty has implications on performance metrics. In this study, we propose a framework to analyze model performance for periventricular Fazekas score prediction that goes beyond conventional metrics. The Fazekas score is an ordinal visual rating scale used to assess the severity of white matter hyperintensities and is known to be affected by inter-rater variability. While the best Fazekas score prediction model achieved a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.70, performance varied across data splits and loss functions, making interpretation of model capabilities difficult. Rather than interpreting epistemic uncertainty of a model's prediction as an isolated scalar value, our approach of uncertainty mapping relates uncertainty to its position within the learned feature representation. This highlights regions of class-boundary transitions where cases appear more ambiguous and misclassifications are more likely. It also identifies potential label disagreement, including low-uncertainty misclassified cases that expert review found to be inconsistent with the original reference Fazekas score. Therefore, uncertainty mapping allows model behaviour to be examined in relation to class separation and potential model-label disagreement. Loss function choice also influenced the uncertainty profile, with some models showing clearer class separation and more localized uncertainty in ambiguous regions than others. These findings suggest that uncertainty mapping for Fazekas score predictions can support model interpretation and targeted dataset review when reference labels are affected by ambiguity/ inter-rater variability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17753
A lot of expectations have been put for years on integrating domain expert knowledge in image classification models. Several approaches have been explored, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) opened up a new avenue of research leading to many variants, and more recently to Concept-based Embedding Models (CEMs). CBM consider binary encoding of each concept, while CEM expands this idea by embedding each concept through two vectors. However in real-life scenarii, domain experts' knowledge is usually organized in concepts determined by various attributes, each attribute encoded either with numerical values, or range of values, or binary values, or categorical values. In this work, we first finetune an image feature extractor for classifying attributes representing the downstream object classes, where the class attributes have been specified by experts under various encoding formats. A classification head is then learnt from these various attributes to categorize target objects. We experimentally show that it improves the classification for three datasets: Kaggle fish dataset, AWA2 and a more challenging new wood charcoal dataset. We then propose an automatic selection of potential missclassified data. In this second step, experts are asked for those data to eventually modify the predicted attributes in order to improve the classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17749
We present TAPe+ML v3, a compact computer vision system based on TAPe (Theory of Active Perception), a structured representation that encodes relations among perceptual elements before recognition. Instead of operating directly on pixel tensors, the system uses a shared TAPe representation and a modular recognition architecture for image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. TAPe+ML v3 combines background and contour processing, local object localization, prototype-based classification, and a coordinator for specialized submodels. Across the reported experiments, it uses fewer than 100,000 parameters. On COCO object detection, it obtains 84.7 mAP50 and 65.3 mAP50-95. On COCO instance segmentation, it obtains 80.7 mask mAP50 and 58.4 mask mAP50-95. In classification experiments, it reaches 92 percent validation accuracy on Imagenette under an identical-training comparison with a raw-pixel baseline, and 89.9 percent Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-Real. We also evaluate compactness in video scene detection and adaptation under distribution shift in an industrial pilot. The results suggest that shifting part of the modeling burden from network parameters to a structured input representation can support compact multi-task vision systems with reduced data, memory, and compute requirements.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20869
With the increasing deployment of deep neural networks in critical systems, such as medical diagnostics and autonomous vehicles, ensuring their interpretability is crucial to building trust in decision-making systems. In the field of explainable artificial intelligence, prototype-based reasoning has gained particular popularity, as it mimics human cognitive processes by explaining model decisions based on visual similarity under the looks like this paradigm. While this paradigm has been thoroughly investigated in the context of global image classification, the interpretability of dense predictions, particularly semantic segmentation, remains largely unexplored despite its immense importance in tasks requiring precise object localization. Existing prototype-based interpretable segmentation models rely on ante-hoc architectures, which entails significant limitations because they require costly training from scratch and modifications to the network structure, ultimately leading to a noticeable drop in predictive performance compared to standard black-box models. To address this issue, we propose PiPS (Post-hoc interpretable Prototypical Segmentation), the first fully post-hoc solution for generating prototypical explanations for semantic segmentation models. Our method enables the extraction of intuitive, spatially localized explanations from any pre-trained network without modification or fine-tuning, thereby preserving 100% of the model's original predictive performance. This approach opens a new avenue for the safe and cost-effective deployment of transparent systems in advanced computer vision tasks. Codebase available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16909
Breast histopathology analysis increasingly relies on distributed learning because direct data pooling across institutions is often restricted by privacy, governance, and communication constraints. This study compares server-based Federated Averaging (FedAvg), fully decentralized gossip learning, and Hybrid Gossip-FedAvg for invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) patch classification. Experiments used 277,524 color image patches with patient-disjoint training, validation, and test partitions and a workload-balanced, Dirichlet-guided allocation across six nodes. Ring, random degree-3, and fully connected gossip topologies were evaluated together with sensitivity analyses for statistical heterogeneity, mixing coefficient, learning rate, model drift, prediction disagreement, calibration, clinically motivated operating points, communication payload, and patient-level IDC burden, together with auxiliary backbone robustness analyses. In the principal alpha=0.3 experiment, Hybrid Gossip-FedAvg achieved a test area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC-AUC) of 0.8811, closely followed by FedAvg at 0.8801 and fully connected gossip at 0.8751. Across three independent patient-level repetitions, FedAvg and Hybrid Gossip-FedAvg obtained the same mean ROC-AUC of 0.9082, with standard deviations of 0.0037 and 0.0043, respectively. Hybrid achieved the highest mean area under the precision-recall curve of 0.8240, whereas FedAvg produced the lowest mean Brier score of 0.1335. Denser gossip graphs improved discrimination but increased theoretical model payload, while ring gossip remained sensitive to learning rate and mixing strength. Overall, FedAvg provided the most consistently reliable server-based baseline, topology-aware gossip offered a viable decentralized alternative, and Hybrid Gossip-FedAvg provided a balanced compromise between peer-to-peer diffusion and periodic global coordination.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16448