Endoscopic depth estimation is a critical technology for improving the safety and precision of minimally invasive surgery. It has attracted considerable attention from researchers in medical imaging, computer vision, and robotics. Over the past decade, a large number of methods have been developed. Despite the existence of several related surveys, a comprehensive overview focusing on recent deep learning-based techniques is still limited. This paper endeavors to bridge this gap by comprehensively reviewing the state-of-the-art literature. Specifically, we provide a thorough survey of the field from three key perspectives: data, methods, and applications. Firstly, at the data level, we describe the acquisition process of publicly available datasets. Secondly, at the methodological level, we introduce both monocular and stereo deep learning-based approaches for endoscopic depth estimation. Thirdly, at the application level, we identify the specific challenges and corresponding solutions for the clinical implementation of depth estimation technology, situated within concrete clinical scenarios. Finally, we outline potential directions for future research, such as domain adaptation, real-time implementation, and the synergistic fusion of depth information with sensor technologies, thereby providing a valuable starting point for researchers to engage with and advance the field toward clinical translation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20881
High classification accuracy alone is insufficient for clinical image analysis, where calibrated confidence and reliable uncertainty estimates are essential. This study proposes a reliability-aware Hybrid-K ensemble selection framework for multiclass cervical cytology classification using the SIPaKMeD dataset. Nine deep learning architectures were evaluated using a fixed stratified five-fold partition and three training seeds. After post-hoc temperature scaling, models were assessed using macro-F1, accuracy, AUROC, expected calibration error (ECE), worst-class ECE (WC-ECE), area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC), Brier score, and negative log-likelihood (NLL). Models were ranked using an equal-weight composite score, and Hybrid-K ensembles were formed from the top-ranked models using soft voting. Robustness was examined using 5,000 Dirichlet-sampled metric-weight vectors, leave-one-metric-out analysis, and corrected paired testing across 15 fold-by-seed evaluations. The final Hybrid-2 ensemble, comprising Swin-Tiny and TinyViT-5M, reduced AURC by 43%, NLL by 17%, and WC-ECE by 36% relative to the best individual model. It was selected in 96.8% of random weighting scenarios, remained unchanged across all leave-one-metric-out analyses, and improved the full composite score. However, per-metric gains were not statistically significant after Holm-Bonferroni correction (all adjusted p >= 0.168). Because post-hoc calibration did not use a fully independent calibration set, calibration-dependent results should be interpreted as exploratory internal estimates. Overall, the framework identified a compact ensemble robust to alternative metric weightings and improved reliability point estimates under internal validation on a single dataset.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09189
We provide an expository introduction on the importance of higher-arity tensor operations to deep learning. Then, we conduct a novel empirical investigation of higher-arity phenomenon in trained neural networks, introduce a hypergraphical generalization of the multilayer perceptron, and explore connections to evolutionary algorithms. We conclude with a discussion of promising directions for future research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00472
Speech-based Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection increasingly relies on speech-enhanced and curated versions of the Pitt Corpus, where speech enhancement, sample selection, and demographic balancing are often treated as beneficial preprocessing steps. However, whether these transformations improve real-world AD detection or instead affect model generalization and prediction behavior remains unclear. In this work, we revisit the role of speech preprocessing and dataset curation across widely used benchmarks for speech-based AD detection. We evaluate the speech quality of different datasets, the cross-dataset generalization of multiple deep learning models under matched and mismatched enhancement settings, and the behavior of several recent large audio-language models (LALMs). Experimental results show that across multiple supervised speech models, speech-enhanced datasets often improve in-domain performance while reducing robustness in cross-domain evaluation. Matched enhancement between training and test data alleviates, but does not eliminate, this degradation. LALMs show a similar sensitivity: enhanced datasets induce stronger class imbalance and prediction shifts than unprocessed data. These results suggest that speech preprocessing and dataset curation can substantially influence downstream AD detection behavior, indicating that ``cleaner'' speech datasets are not necessarily more reliable for real-world AD detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00276
Accurate daily predictions of cold hardiness in woody plants are critical in regions where freezing temperatures can damage dormant buds and reduce seasonal yield. Existing biophysical, hybrid, and deep learning models have shown high predictive accuracy when trained on local data but remain largely site-specific. The limited availability of cold hardiness data, coupled with the lack of principled methods for transferring cold hardiness predictions to new regions and cultivars, has limited the broader adoption and practical utility of these approaches, particularly in data-scarce regions. To address these limitations, we propose a cold hardiness prediction framework that learns a transferable latent representation by capturing region-specific variation through learned embeddings. To enable prediction in previously unseen regions, we infer embeddings from (1) text descriptions of the cultivar and growing region, and (2) limited historical observations, supporting both zero-shot and few-shot transfer. Experiments on datasets from six regions across North America demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art cold hardiness prediction methods, yielding more accurate predictions and substantially improving transfer to data-scarce regions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31097
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) produces rich sequential data such as temporal cine videos and spatial LGE/mapping stacks, yet most deep learning approaches process individual 2D slices, discarding this context. We present MR-JEPA, a self-supervised video foundation model for CMR that extends LeJEPA to 3D spatiotemporal inputs through tubelet tokenization, spatiotemporal masking augmentation, and initialization from a 2D CMR foundation model. Unlike prior CMR video models limited to cine data, MR-JEPA is pretrained on multi-sequence data (cine, LGE, mapping) from 10,505 patients across two centers without annotations. We evaluate the frozen encoder on six downstream tasks using a unified multi-view gated attention architecture: LV ejection fraction, RV ejection fraction, three myocardial strains (GLS, GCS, GRS), and four-class disease detection. MR-JEPA outperforms other compared methods on all five regression tasks, including both a domain-specific CMR model pretrained on more data with text supervision and a natural-video foundation model, achieving an LV EF MAE of 4.79% (r =0.764) and a GLS MAE of 1.87 (r=0.805), with 21-27% MAE reductions over baselines on strain tasks. For disease detection, MR-JEPA achieved a macro AUG of 0.868, remaining competitive with the domain-specific baseline despite using a fully self-supervised pretraining objective. These results demonstrate the potential of a unified video encoder for robust, multi-view utilization of diverse CMR sequences in clinical cardiac quantification and diagnosis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30975
Supervised deep learning methods enable the rapid processing of ecological image data, but depend on a costly annotation process. Consequently, training labels are commonly derived from volunteer citizen science projects. However, disagreement among volunteers introduces uncertainty in the "ground truth" data that are assumed to be correct for model training and validation. Using two datasets containing camera trap images with associated volunteer and expert classifications, we investigated the effects of training under higher ground truth uncertainty. We observed improved overall test accuracy, particularly for images that were more difficult for volunteers. Species-level accuracy also generally improved, but generalisation to a different dataset did not. The benefits of ground truth uncertainty were enhanced by pre-training on ImageNet. Pre-training also reduced the number of training epochs required; further reductions in computational cost, but not gains in accuracy, resulted from additional pre-training on other camera trap images. With unbalanced training data, we still observed a clear benefit of increased ground truth uncertainty for overall accuracy, especially on difficult images. Class imbalance improved accuracy for common species, reduced rare species accuracy, and changed patterns of misclassification to more closely resemble mistakes made by volunteers. Our findings have implications for applying deep learning across ecological image types with multiple labels. Practitioners can improve accuracy, especially on difficult examples, by including moderate levels of label disagreement during training and using models pre-trained on general image data. In addition to improving the use of citizen science-derived labels in model training, our study suggests avenues for more effectively integrating human and deep learning classifications in combined workflows. (abridged)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30789
Timely post-disaster building damage assessment from satellite imagery is a critical engineering decision support task, yet it remains constrained by class imbalance, ambiguous intermediate damage states, and limited cross-event transferability. This study presents, to our knowledge, the first application of Grassmann-Plucker (GP) token mixing to computer vision and introduces two extensions for image classification: the Quantum-inspired Grassmann-Plucker (QGP) head and the Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning Grassmann-Plucker (HQML-GP) head. The GP head represents multiscale relationships among image patch tokens by encoding subspaces formed by token pairs with Plucker coordinates; QGP enriches these coordinates with amplitude-derived probability features, whereas HQML-GP incorporates expectation values generated by a simulated quantum circuit into the geometric token representation. Paired pre- and post-event image patches from the xBD tornado dataset were processed using a frozen six-channel Vision Transformer base encoder with 16 x 16-pixel patches. The three GP-based heads were compared with multilayer perceptron and Transformer baselines under identical training, checkpoint selection, and evaluation protocols. Joplin and Moore tornado samples were used for model development and seen-event testing, while Tuscaloosa was reserved for unseen-event evaluation. QGP led both test sets in accuracy and macro-F1: 83.46% and 64.50% for the seen events, and 66.45% and 52.70% for the unseen event. Although HQML-GP obtained the highest validation macro-F1 of 65.63%, it did not surpass QGP on either test set and required substantially more training time per epoch. These results establish GP token mixing as a competitive attention-free alternative to conventional Transformer-based token mixing for paired satellite image damage classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30633
Systematic generalization remains a significant challenge in deep learning. In particular, combinatorial generalization - generalizing to new configurations of known factors of variation - is effortless for humans but difficult for standard neural architectures that rely on statistical correlations rather than explicit structural representations. We introduce a new architectural component that embeds structured inductive bias into deep learning: an attention mechanism operating over tensor-product representations (TPRs). Through controlled experiments on compositional tasks, we show that this TPR-attention mechanism outperforms existing architectural components in combinatorial generalization. These results highlight the value of integrating explicit compositional structure into neural attention and point toward a promising path for models capable of systematic generalization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30124
Brain tumor segmentation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a critical task for diagnosis and treatment planning. Despite the success of deep learning architectures such as U-Net and its variants, performance degradation across datasets remains a major challenge, particularly under domain shift and limited annotated data. To address this issue, this study systematically evaluates how individual MRI sequences influence model robustness across two well-known datasets. A ResUNet-based framework is employed, where each modality is trained independently to isolate its effect under a controlled cross-dataset evaluation protocol with tumor size stratification, without target-domain training, or with limited domain adaptation. Results show that the T2f/FLAIR sequence achieves the best cross-dataset performance, with Dice scores exceeding 75%. It consistently outperforms other modalities across most tumor size ranges, while multi-sequence training further improves performance. Additionally, even limited target-domain adaptation yields rapid initial gains, reducing the need for extensive annotations and costly retraining. Our source code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29944
Accurate interpretation of soil moisture patterns is critical for irrigation scheduling and crop management, yet existing approaches for soil moisture time-series analysis either rely on threshold-based rules or data-hungry machine learning or deep learning models that are limited in adaptability and interpretability. In this study, we propose SPADE (Soil moisture Pattern and Anomaly DEtection), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first LLM-based framework specifically developed for soil moisture time-series analysis. Using GPT-4.1 and domain-informed prompts, SPADE performs zero-shot joint identification of wetting events and anomalies without task-specific annotation, training, or fine-tuning. By converting time-series observations into a textual representation, SPADE identifies wetting-event timing, estimates sensor-level moisture responses, detects and classifies multiple predefined anomaly types, and generates structured, human-readable reports. SPADE was evaluated using real-world soil moisture data collected from commercial and research farms encompassing four crop types across the United States. Compared with the evaluated training-free baselines, SPADE achieved higher anomaly recall and F1-score, strong precision and recall for wetting-event detection, and high accuracy in classifying the observed anomaly types. Its structured reports summarize event timing, anomaly type, concise explanations, and sensor-level moisture responses, supporting practical interpretation of soil moisture patterns. These outputs may support soil moisture review, anomaly screening, and relative comparison of wetting responses rather than direct irrigation prescription.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18123
Semantic segmentation is a crucial task for understanding Mars, the most Earth-like planet in our solar system. However, it is challenging because the Martian surface is highly unstructured and complex, making accurate pixel-level prediction and fine-grained annotation difficult. Recent advancements in deep learning have introduced numerous methods and datasets to address these challenges. Nevertheless, the field lacks a robust, publicly available, and reproducible baseline, as well as a unified benchmark to facilitate fair evaluations. In this work, we present nnMNet, a new baseline model designed for Martian terrain semantic segmentation. Building upon nnWNet, we integrate linear attention to better capture global context and employ lightweight convolutions to reduce computational overhead. To bridge the gap between local and global representations, we introduce the Spatially-Aware Fusion Block (SAFB), which augments and combines features with diverse characteristics. Furthermore, we establish a new benchmark by curating and standardizing three high-quality datasets for thorough evaluation. nnMNet achieves new state-of-the-art 86.61%, 83.25%, and 88.24% mIoU on SynMars-TW, SynMars-Air, and MarsScapes, respectively. Our code, models, and datasets are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29609
Deep learning architectures are increasingly proposed for patient trajectory modeling in electronic health records (EHRs), yet their advantage over simpler, more interpretable models is rarely subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny in real-world clinical settings. We present a comprehensive patient timeline pipeline applied to elderly patients in CPRD Aurum, incorporating 260 clinical conditions classified via a three-tier automated framework including specialised detection logic for 17 complex conditions. Using this infrastructure, we benchmark Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (TG-CNN) against Logistic Regression with LASSO regularisation and Random Forests for predicting 12-month all-cause emergency hospitalisation risk, motivated by (but not filtered to) the elevated risk of adverse drug reactions. Under cross-validation, TG-CNN achieves a marginally higher mean AUC-ROC than LASSO (0.712 vs. 0.705), whereas on the held-out test set LASSO achieves the highest discrimination of three models (AUC-ROC 0.733, versus 0.710 for Random Forest and 0.702 for TG-CNN). We show, that discrimination alone is an incomplete criterion for clinical deployment: after Platt calibration, LASSO is the only model with an acceptable calibration slope (0.817), while Random Forest (0.759) and, TG-CNN (0.391) remain substantially miscalibrated. We argue that LASSO, not the highest-discriminating model, is the model best suited to direct clinical deployment. We present lessons for the machine learning and healthcare community regarding data infrastructure, model selection, and value of calibration and interpretability in high-stakes decision support.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29419
This study introduces a Visual Question Answering model designed specifically for nondestructive evaluation applications. VQA models allow inspectors to interactively query NDE images, asking targeted questions like, Is there a crack or Where is the defect located and receive precise answers from the model. Leveraging deep learning and natural language processing, the developed system integrates image feature extraction (via a ResNet-50 model) and language generation capabilities (via GPT-2) to provide accurate, informative feedback. By enabling direct question-and-answer interactions, this VQA model significantly improves inspection efficiency, reduces potential errors, and enhances usability in practical field scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29408
Video traffic constitutes a significant share of global web traffic. To reduce its volume, video codecs have been developed and continuously improved. While the industry has achieved substantial progress in traditional video coding, neural video codecs (NVCs) have recently emerged as a new approach that applies deep learning to video compression. This creates new challenges for compression quality assessment, which is essential for the further development and improvement of such codecs. In particular, it is important to evaluate the novel temporal compression paradigms introduced by NVCs. In this work, we present a large-scale subjective dataset of videos compressed with both neural and traditional video codecs. The subjective scores were collected through crowd-sourced pairwise comparisons. The proposed dataset provides a valuable resource for the development and benchmarking of video quality metrics tailored to neural video codecs. The dataset is available at the following link: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29331
Deep learning is often criticized for its theoretical research lagging behind practice. To make deep learning easier to understand, the entropy space theory is first introduced here. The entropy space can cover all the possibilities of any deep learning model by topological structure. It is independent of network parameters. Through the designed fundamental operations and norm, entropy space is proven to be a normed space within the formal axiomatic framework. Based on the theory, a unified coordinate system is proposed. It can coordinatize every state of a model and rank them by compression of the maximal value of information entropy. The theory offers a novel priori framework for mathematical fundamentals of deep learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29279
Tabular-to-image encoding methods enable the application of models based on both convolutional neural networks and vision transformers to tabular data, transforming feature vectors into images. Existing methods employ linear and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., Principal Component Analysis (PCA), t-SNE, and UMAP) to determine pixel positions, resulting in images whose spatial layout do not inherently reflect feature relationships. This paper introduces Visibility Graphs for Tabular-to-Image Encoding (VG-TIE), a novel method that encodes the structure of feature values using Natural Visibility Graph (NVG) and Horizontal Visibility Graph (HVG) into a two-dimensional space obtained through PCA. The resulting images are model-agnostic and intrinsically interpretable. Each pixel corresponds to an input feature, its intensity reflects the magnitude and direction of deviation from the population mean, and edges represent formally defined visibility relationships between features. VG-TIE provides two interpretability methods: (i) feature ranking from node degree distributions; and (ii) local and global feature importance from pixel intensity combined with Grad-CAM. Experiments on six public tabular datasets show that VG-TIE is competitive with other tabular-to-image methods while providing interpretability on feature importance and ranking similar to intrinsic interpretable methods. The results highlight the potential of the proposed image-based transformation to provide an effective framework that expands the use of deep learning across tabular data domains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29650
Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is the modality of choice to assess myocardial infarction (MI) lesions. Nowadays MI volume quantification is not performed routinely in clinical practice. Numerous deep learning (DL) methods have been developed to automate the segmentation of the myocardium and infarct regions. However, most studies rely on relatively small datasets which typically undergo pre-processing steps to standardize images and focus on a specific phase of myocardial infarction following reperfusion therapy. These limitations have impeded the development of models that are generalizable across diverse conditions and thus suitable for routine clinical use. To advance research and establish benchmarks in generalizable learning for myocardial infarct quantification, this paper presents findings from the Myocardial Segmentation with Automated Infarct Quantification (MYOSAIQ) challenge. The dataset set up for the challenge combines 439 CMR volumes from two multicenter clinical trials, with representative data acquired in acute and chronic phases after acute MI. Data were acquired in 16 centers using MRI scanners from three different vendors. Six teams participated until the end of the challenge, employing various baseline models, data augmentation techniques, and confidence strategies. To enhance the significance of this study, we compare the challengers' results with those of fine-tuned foundation models. Our results indicate that well-designed UNet-based techniques outperform fully automatic foundation models for LGE MR segmentation. While the best methods achieve high-quality and stable delineations of the left ventricle and myocardium under various conditions, they remain improvable in accurately segmenting infarct regions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29246
Insect pollination is critical for global food production, yet monitoring pollinators at commercial farm scale remains a challenge. Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have enabled detailed analysis of pollinator behaviour, but monitoring must trade-off detail against spatial coverage and human or technological resources. This paper presents the Automated Guided Robot for Insect and Crop Activity Monitoring (AGRICAM), a purpose-built robotic system designed to meet the requirements of large-scale pollination monitoring in protected cropping systems. AGRICAM operates autonomously on low-cost, easily installed track for movement along crop rows, without disrupting farm operations or insect behaviour. The platform integrates two RGB cameras, microclimate sensors, GPS and RFID modules, motion sensors, and 4G cellular network connectivity for data transmission. A web interface enables remote device configuration and scheduling. The system autonomously captures video and image data of insects' locations and local environmental conditions. These are transferred to the cloud and analysed using computer vision models to quantify pollinator visitation and spatio-temporal activity variation. We deployed the system on a commercial blueberry farm to demonstrate and test its capability. It successfully mapped insect pollination patterns across 80 m long industrial polytunnels over 30 hours. This data enabled spatial analyses of insect activity we used to confirm a uniform pollinator distribution within polytunnels, as desired by the farm management team. The data also highlighted variation of insect activity associated with time of day and microclimate. AGRICAM therefore has been shown to be a scalable, automated crop pollination monitor that can support data-driven decisions to enhance pollination management, thereby improving crop productivity and food security.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29237
Anti-UAV perception systems must remain reliable when sensor streams degrade under occlusion, fast motion, or modality-specific failure. Existing multimodal anti-UAV systems fuse RGB and thermal streams deterministically, without modeling predictive uncertainty, and cannot express doubt when streams disagree. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) produces calibrated per-class uncertainty in a single forward pass. EDTC already exploits this for thermal-only perception, yet cross-modal evidential fusion remains unaddressed. This paper extends EDTC to multimodal RGB-Thermal perception via Discounted Belief Fusion (DBF), which converts inter-modal conflict into uncertainty mass before aggregating stream opinions. Bounding boxes are resolved by selecting the lower-uncertainty modality. On the Anti-UAV benchmark, multimodal fusion consistently outperforms either single stream (test Acc 0.670 vs. 0.604 IR, 0.598 RGB) at real-time speed (at least 38 FPS). However, DBF is empirically indistinguishable from undiscounted averaging: near-zero inter-modal conflict on this presence-dominated benchmark leaves the discounting step inert. The fused uncertainty is well-calibrated (ECE 0.057) yet expectedly a weaker localization failure detector than spatial variance (AUROC 0.626 vs. 0.739). The null result is structural: the benchmark's near-universal presence and vacuous miss-encoding jointly suppress inter-modal conflict, a diagnosis that delimits where conflict-aware fusion provides measurable benefit.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29235