Image_Classification
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Learning to Unify Deformable Shape and Texture Representations for Cardiac Video Classification
2026-07-08 15:15:16Tonmoy Hossain, Miaomiao ZhangAbstract
Deformable shape representations have proven to be robust complements to texture features in cardiac image classification, offering geometric priors that are invariant to imaging artifacts and intensity variations. However, existing deep networks perform simple concatenation to combine these distinct feature representations, which neither fully exploits their complementary nature nor learns cross-modal feature dependencies. Furthermore, this results in uniform attention across all timepoints; hence ignoring the varying diagnostic importance across the cardiac phases. In this paper, we propose a novel cardiac video classification model that, for the first time, learns temporal features in an integrated space of deformable shape and image texture representations. In particular, we design a bi-directional cross-attention in the latent space to fuse latent deformable shape and image features, allowing each modality to adaptively weight the other based on spatio-temporal correspondence. In contrast to current methods that apply uniform weighting across all the cardiac phases, our approach learns to dynamically adjust the contributions of shape and texture representations, derived from images, over time. We demonstrate state-of-the-art classification performance on a cine cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) video dataset, achieving improved interpretability from attention mechanisms that identify diagnostically critical cardiac phases and modality contributions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07518
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EdgeCompress: Coupling Multidimensional Model Compression and Dynamic Inference for EdgeAI
2026-07-08 04:03:32Hao Kong, Di Liu, Shuo Huai, Xiangzhong Luo, Ravi Subramaniam, Christian Makaya, Qian Lin, Weichen LiuAbstract
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated encouraging results in image classification tasks. However, the prohibitive computational cost of CNNs hinders the deployment of CNNs onto resource-constrained embedded devices. To address this issue, we propose EdgeCompress, a comprehensive compression framework to reduce the computational overhead of CNNs. In EdgeCompress, we first introduce dynamic image cropping (DIC), where we design a lightweight foreground predictor to accurately crop the most informative foreground object of input images for inference, which avoids redundant computation on background regions. Subsequently, we present compound shrinking (CS) to collaboratively compress the three dimensions (depth, width, and resolution) of CNNs according to their contribution to accuracy and model computation. DIC and CS together constitute a multidimensional CNN compression framework, which is able to comprehensively reduce the computational redundancy in both input images and neural network architectures, thereby improving the inference efficiency of CNNs. Further, we present a dynamic inference framework to efficiently process input images with different recognition difficulties, where we cascade multiple models with different complexities from our compression framework and dynamically adopt different models for different input images, which further compresses the computational redundancy and improves the inference efficiency of CNNs, facilitating the deployment of advanced CNNs onto embedded hardware. Experiments on ImageNet-1K demonstrate that EdgeCompress reduces the computation of ResNet-50 by 48.8% while improving the top-1 accuracy by 0.8%. Meanwhile, we improve the accuracy by 4.1% with similar computation compared to HRank, the state-of-the-art compression framework. The source code and models are available at this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06982
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ReMoDEx: A Local-to-Global Relevance-Based Model Decision Explainability Framework for large-Scale Image Datasets
2026-07-08 01:15:50Abhay Kumar Pathak, Mrityunjay Chaubey, Manjari GuptaAbstract
Deep learning image classifiers achieve strong predictive performance yet remain opaque in how decisions are formed. A model may predict correctly while relying on irrelevant cues, shortcut associations, peripheral structures, or device level artifacts instead of task relevant regions. On large scale datasets this opacity is especially problematic, since inspecting heatmaps one sample at a time cannot scale to thousands of predictions. We propose Relevance Based Model Decision Explainability (ReMoDEx), a framework for systematic, dataset scale assessment of model decision behaviour in image classification. ReMoDEx defines a stepwise pipeline: model inference, target class selection, relevance map generation, heatmap standardisation, similarity based grouping of patterns, cluster level interpretation, and spatial relevance assessment. Local methods GradCAM++, Integrated Gradients, Occlusion Sensitivity, and Layerwise Relevance Propagation are each combined independently with a single global module that summarises an entire set of relevance maps into a few decision strategy clusters, replacing sample by sample inspection with an automatic, scalable summary. To demonstrate ReMoDEx, we applied it to a VGG16 based classifier distinguishing COVID-19, Normal, Lung Opacity, and Viral Pneumonia. The classifier showed stable performance (86.27% test accuracy, 0.9624 test AUC). However, each explainer combined with the global module consistently produced two recurring strategies: central thoracic region decisions and border/corner sensitive decisions, indicating possible shortcut learning that conventional metrics could not reveal. Masked image validation confirmed that model confidence and predicted class changed when central or peripheral regions were occluded. ReMoDEx thus provides a scalable relevance based decision assessment framework and an essential complement to accuracy based evaluation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06889
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Visual graphs for image classification: does the structure affect performance?
2026-07-07 14:01:44Alessandra IbbaAbstract
Deep learning models have emerged in machine learning and related fields, demonstrating astonishing performance in various visual tasks. Despite their great success, however, these models are unable to fully encode intrinsic visual structures, and often ignore the spatial, topological, and semantic information contained within an image. Graph neural networks offer a good framework to face this aspect, but their effective use for visual tasks has been only partly explored and mainly starting from a limited perspective. This work aims to address this gap by conducting a systematic comparison of current graph construction techniques within the context of a fixed three-layer GCN architecture. Through an empirical study, it demonstrates in particular how the network structure affects performance and provides an important methodological contribution regarding the computational stages preceding graph utilization, which will be strongly influenced by the structure itself.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06295
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MSA-DCNN: A Data-Efficient Multi-Scale Deformable CNN for Medical Image Classification
2026-07-07 09:52:46Hamza Hussaini, Shahana Bano, Eyad Elyan, Carlos Francisco Moreno-Garc\'iaAbstract
Existing deep learning methods perform well in medical image classification but struggle with multi-scale morphology and limited annotations due to fixed sampling and data-hungry training. Existing approaches address these challenges in isolation: DCN-based models provide adaptive sampling but lack explicit multi-scale attention fusion and label-efficient regularisation; multi-scale architectures typically rely on static fusion; and semi-supervised methods target label scarcity without jointly modelling adaptive cross-scale representations. We propose MSA-DCNN, a scale-consistent deformable attention learning framework that introduces adaptive multi-scale sampling, within-scale saliency refinement, learned cross-scale fusion, and auxiliary self-distillation within a unified optimisation scheme, with potential to generalise to structurally heterogeneous anatomy. We evaluate on three public benchmarks and an external hold-out set for leukaemia. MSA-DCNN demonstrates competitive and often better performance against ViT baselines, CNN baselines, and a MICCAI semi-supervised baseline under distribution shift and label scarcity in accuracy, F1, and AUC (binary), while using fewer parameters. Ablations confirm complementary component contributions, supporting MSA-DCNN as a practical foundation for data-efficient medical image classification.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06083
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Few-Medoids: An Embarrassingly Simple Coreset Selection Method for Few-Shot Knowledge Distillation
2026-07-07 06:40:58Cemil-Andrei Dilmac, Florinel-Alin Croitoru, Radu Tudor IonescuAbstract
Coreset selection aims to identify a small and highly representative subset of a massive dataset for efficient model training. The problem remains challenging even in the few-shot knowledge distillation (KD) setup, where a full-scale pre-trained teacher informs the student network. Typical sample selection strategies often struggle to surpass the random selection baseline. In this paper, we showcase few-medoids, an embarrassingly simple coreset selection strategy that chooses the samples closest to the centroid (average image) of each class. We present extensive KD experiments on four datasets, covering a wide range of image classification problems, and three teacher-student model pairs, comprising both convolutional and transformer networks. Although the proposed method is embarrassingly simple, our empirical results indicate that few-medoids is able to consistently surpass the random selection baseline, as well as the other coreset selection strategies. We therefore consider that few-medoids can be used as a drop-in replacement for commonly-used baselines (e.g. herding or k-center Greedy), in future research on coreset selection. To reproduce the reported results, we publicly release our code at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05891
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Complementary Roles of Image Classification and Vessel Segmentation in AI-Based Screening for Retinopathy of Prematurity Plus Disease in a Kenyan Preterm Cohort
2026-07-07 04:40:16Fred Mutisya, Oscar Onyango, Sarah Sitati, Syokau Ilovi, Aeesha NJ Malik, Brenda W'mosi, Brian Makini, Jalemba Aluuvala, Josiah Onyango, Rachael Kanguha Mmene, Steven WanyeeAbstract
Background. Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a preventable cause of childhood blindness, with rising burden in low- and middle-income countries where ROP-trained ophthalmologists are scarce. Plus disease, marked by retinal vessel dilation and tortuosity, triggers treatment but is subjective and variable. Automated screening could extend specialist reach, but African evidence remains limited. Methods. We analysed 121 Kenyan preterm infants, covering 237 eyes and 1,635 fundus images graded as No Plus, Pre-Plus or Plus. Vessel annotations from two graders supported segmentation training. Eleven configurations were evaluated for eye-level Plus detection using patient-grouped nested cross-validation, including image classifiers, multiple-instance learning, multi-task segmentation-classification, and segment-then-classify pipelines. Results. Vessel segmentation was feasible, achieving pooled Dice 0.533, IoU 0.368, sensitivity 0.623 and specificity 0.979 on held-out images. RGB classifiers were highly sensitive but over-referred, while segmentation-coupled models were more specific. Combining approaches improved performance: an OR-based screen achieved the highest sensitivity, an AND-based confirmation achieved the highest specificity, and a probability ensemble gave the best balanced performance, with sensitivity 0.692, specificity 0.914 and balanced accuracy 0.803, outperforming the vision classifier alone. Conclusions. Classification and vessel segmentation are complementary for ROP Plus detection in Kenyan data. Classifiers support sensitive case-finding, while segmentation improves specificity and reduces over-referral. African ROP AI systems should use combined workflows and undergo prospective multi-site validation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05825
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Do Counterfactually Fair Image Classifiers Satisfy Group Fairness? -- A Theoretical and Empirical Study
2026-07-07 01:48:59Sangwon Jung, Sumin Yu, Sanghyuk Chun, Taesup MoonAbstract
The notion of algorithmic fairness has been actively explored from various aspects of fairness, such as counterfactual fairness (CF) and group fairness (GF). However, the exact relationship between CF and GF remains to be unclear, especially in image classification tasks; the reason is because we often cannot collect counterfactual samples regarding a sensitive attribute, essential for evaluating CF, from the existing images (\eg, a photo of the same person but with different secondary sex characteristics). In this paper, we construct new image datasets for evaluating CF by using a high-quality image editing method and carefully labeling with human annotators. Our datasets, \oursceleb and \ourslfw, build upon the popular image GF benchmarks; hence, we can evaluate CF and GF simultaneously. We empirically observe that CF does not imply GF in image classification, whereas previous studies on tabular datasets observed the opposite. We theoretically show that it could be due to the existence of a latent attribute $G$ that is correlated with, but not caused by, the sensitive attribute (\eg, secondary sex characteristics are highly correlated with hair length). From this observation, we propose a simple baseline, Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation (CKD), to mitigate such correlation with the sensitive attributes. Extensive experimental results on \oursceleb and \ourslfw demonstrate that CF-achieving models satisfy GF if we successfully reduce the reliance on $G$ (\eg, using CKD).
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06603
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To Retain or to Adapt? Generalizing Continual Learning
2026-07-06 20:11:53Giulia Lanzillotta, Mandana Samiei, Doina Precup, Razvan Pascanu, Claire VernadeAbstract
The Continual Learning (CL) literature has long been driven by the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This objective rests on a pervasive, often unstated assumption: that a lifelong learner should approximate the Joint-Task Learning (JTL) solution and retain all previously acquired knowledge. We challenge this retention-centered premise, arguing that in non-stationary environments prioritizing retention can impede real-time adaptation. Shifting the focus to the Average Lifelong Error (ALE), we formalize CL as an online optimization problem governed by the interaction between environmental and learning dynamics. We introduce Transfer Efficiency as a quantitative measure of the tension between Instability, the bias inherited from conflicting past experience, and Transient Error, the optimization cost of learning new tasks from scratch. Under mild convergence conditions, holding across linear and neural network models, this decomposition yields a Critical Task Duration: a closed-form threshold beyond which historical knowledge transitions from a warm-start advantage to an optimization liability whenever retention induces a positive stationary bias. We validate these theoretical predictions on continual image classification and reinforcement learning benchmarks. Finally, by connecting continual learning to the online learning framework of predictable sequences, we show that JTL is only one instance of a broader family of objectives, and we propose a new general class of continual learning algorithms, which we call Predictive Continual Learning. Predictive CL algorithms optimize expected future performance under an explicit, dynamically updated model of future tasks. As a proof of concept, we analyze a Window algorithm that interpolates between JTL and Independent-Task Learning (ITL), outperforming both under controlled distributional drift.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05609
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Continual Model Merging with Test-Time Adaptation for Whole-Slide Image Analysis
2026-07-06 07:48:00Duc-Thanh Le, Doanh C. Bui, Ma\"i K. Nguyen, Khang NguyenAbstract
Model merging offers a practical alternative to conventional continual learning by integrating independently fine-tuned models without retaining previous training data. Recent state-of-the-art model merging methods employ test-time adaptation (TTA-guided merging) to address distribution shifts by adjusting merging-related variables using unlabeled target data. However, these methods have primarily been studied in multi-task or single-target settings, and their behavior under sequential continual learning remains insufficiently understood. We present a benchmark study that maps this family of methods to rehearsal-free continual Whole Slide Image classification and evaluates them against traditional continual-learning approaches. Experiments on six TCGA cancer-subtyping cohorts cover CLASS-IL and TASK-IL scenarios, in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation, and different task orders. The results show that adapting model merging at test time can provide strong task-specific performance and improve retention of previously acquired knowledge without storing historical WSIs. Nevertheless, performance remains sensitive to task order and to the interaction between adaptation on the current distribution and accumulated knowledge. This benchmark identifies model merging with test-time adaptation as a promising direction for continual computational pathology and motivates future methods that balance adaptation to domain shift with explicit preservation of historical knowledge.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04755
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OmniOpt: Taxonomy, Geometry, and Benchmarking of Modern Optimizers
2026-07-04 21:27:05Siyuan Li, Jiabao Pan, Yumou Liu, Zhuoli Ouyang, Xin Jin, Xinglong Xu, Jingxuan Wei, Shengye Pang, Jintao Che, Xuanhe Zhou, Conghui He, Cheng TanAbstract
Optimizer selection for large-scale model training has become a system-level design decision constrained jointly by compute, memory, tuning budget, and task diversity, yet the landscape of over one hundred methods remains fragmented. We therefore present OmniOpt, a unified survey and benchmark cookbook of optimizers for the research community. OmniOpt rests on four coupled components. First, we treat every optimizer update as a structured transformation through a five-stage meta-pipeline, and show that most methods engage only one or two of these stages. Second, we use norm-constrained linear minimization oracles (LMOs) to unify different optimizers. Third, these two views ground a dual-dimension taxonomy, one dimension assigning each method to a mechanism family and the other recording the measurable training objectives it aims to improve. Fourth, and at the core of this paper, we instantiate the full taxonomy in a unified cross-domain benchmark spanning representative optimizers, model scales, and training regimes from language model pretraining to image classification, systematically analyzing each method family across multiple effect objectives and laying out their trade-offs. OmniOpt thus supplies the research community with an operational coordinate system for selecting optimizers under explicit mechanism and objective assumptions, and charts a direction for the future development of the optimizer community.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04033
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Probabilistic Robustness in Medical Image Classification
2026-07-04 09:57:17Yi Zhang, Siddartha Khastgir, Xingyu ZhaoAbstract
Deep learning (DL) has shown strong performance in medical image classification, but its trustworthy deployment remains challenging in safety-critical clinical settings, where prediction errors under perturbations may lead to severe consequences. Existing studies mainly focus on adversarial robustness (AR) from a worst-case perspective; however, such settings may be less representative of real medical applications. In this work, we investigate probabilistic robustness (PR) as a more practical measure of model trustworthiness. To this end, we construct a set of natural corruption settings for medical image classification and systematically evaluate commonly used DL models on MedMNIST v2 dataset. Our study provides a statistically grounded perspective on assessing the trustworthiness of DL models, thereby supporting their more trustworthy deployment in medical imaging applications.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03797
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Boosting Ultrasound Image Classification via Attribute-Guided Dual-Branch Framework
2026-07-02 03:20:12Bo Zhao, Yapeng Li, Juhua Liu, Bo DuAbstract
Ultrasound image classification is essential for computer-aided diagnosis. However, current methods often neglect clinical priors, leading to poor generalization in challenging scenarios and a lack of interpretability that limits clinical adoption. To address these issues, we aim to develop a medical-prior module that can be seamlessly integrated into existing pipelines to enhance both diagnostic performance and interpretability. In this paper, we propose an attribute-guided dual-branch framework for ultrasound classification that introduces domain-agnostic medical attribute priors, improving generalization while offering interpretable evidence. Specifically, a baseline branch follows conventional architectures and predicts image categories via a fully connected classifier. An attribute-guided branch injects domain-agnostic attributes as priors and produces human-interpretable decision cues. Finally, an adaptive decision module fuses the two branches in a data-dependent manner to yield the final prediction. Experiments across diverse ultrasound classification tasks demonstrate that our approach can be integrated into multiple backbones and state-of-the-art methods with low overhead, consistently improving accuracy and interpretability. Code is available at: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01648
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Fusion: A Framework for Unified Sequential Token AdaptatIon in VisiOn TraNsformers
2026-07-01 15:51:25Aravind Pradeep, Samira Nazari, Mahdi Taheri, Christian HerglotzAbstract
Vision Transformers achieve strong image classification accuracy but process all image regions with nearly the same computation, even when many regions are redundant or uninformative. Recent adaptive inference methods reduce this cost by selectively compressing tokens or terminating inference early, but combining these mechanisms often causes unstable intermediate representations and accuracy degradation. We introduce Fusion, a unified adaptive inference framework that coordinates token merging, early exiting, and token pruning through a simple staged design: tokens are merged first, confidence is evaluated next, and pruning is applied only to samples that continue inference. This ordering allows the three mechanisms to operate cooperatively rather than competitively. Fusion further includes lightweight routing modules that adapt compression strength to each input and support inference-time adjustment of the accuracy--latency trade-off without retraining. On ImageNet-1k with DeiT-S, Fusion matches or surpasses state-of-the-art adaptive ViT methods at comparable compute budgets while reducing calibration error by up to $4\times$ and inference energy by $48\%$. Experiments across ImageNet-100, CIFAR-100, and ImageNette with multiple ViT backbones demonstrate consistent transferability without dataset-specific tuning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02612
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Rethinking Multi-Label Image Classification With Deep Learning: Taxonomy, Challenge, and Outlook
2026-07-01 12:05:57Xuelin Zhu, Xiu-Shen Wei, Jiawei Ge, Shuai Xu, Bing WangAbstract
Multi-label image classification (MLIC), a fundamental task in computer vision, focuses on identifying multiple objects or concepts within an image, underpinning numerous read-world applications, such as autonomous driving, disease diagnosis, recommendation system, and mobile service robot. Over the past decade, deep learning paradigms based on convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and Transformers have significantly advanced this field, owing to their powerful capability in visual representation and relationship modeling. These advances have markedly improved the robustness, scalability, and generalization ability of MLIC models across diverse datasets and application domains. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the deep learning-based literature on MLIC. Concretely, we first revisit the background, including problem definition, datasets, backbones and evaluation metrics. Next, we develop a plausible taxonomy for the deep learning-based MLIC approaches, organizing them into six groups: region-oriented methods, label-oriented methods, architecture-oriented methods, representation-oriented methods, learning-oriented methods, and data-oriented methods. Finally, we provide an insightful exposition of the underlying learning game in MLIC and its implications for other vision domains, and we empirically summarize the key challenges and research directions in MLIC while outlining promising avenues for future development. We believe this survey offers the research community a holistic and systematic perspective on MLIC, thereby facilitating subsequent exploration and innovation in this field and beyond.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00839
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Active Learning for Cascaded Object Detection: Balancing Coverage and Uncertainty in Table Extraction Pipelines
2026-07-01 10:30:05Eliott Thomas, Mickael Coustaty, Aurelie Joseph, Gaspar Deloin, Vincent Poulain d'Andecy, Jean-Marc OgierAbstract
Table extraction from business documents relies on a cascaded pipeline where Table Detection (TD) first localizes tables and Table Structure Recognition (TSR) then recovers their internal layout. Building task-specific training sets for this pipeline is costly, particularly for TSR which requires fine-grained structural annotations. Active learning (AL) can reduce this annotation burden, yet most AL strategies are designed for single-model tasks and do not account for inter-stage dependencies in cascaded architectures. In this work, we present the first adaptation of Uncertainty Herding (UHerding), a hybrid coverage-uncertainty sampling method originally proposed for image classification, to cascaded object detection pipelines. We propose two pipeline-aware extensions that exploit the TD-to-TSR dependency: RankFusion adds dual-manifold coverage over both detection and structure representation spaces, while CAPA further incorporates stage-dependent gating and per-task uncertainty calibration. Extensive experiments across two public (PubTables-1M and FinTabNet) and two private table extraction datasets, with various annotation budgets (from 71 to 500 documents) show that UHerding generalizes well to table extraction, outperforming each baseline. Among pipeline-aware variants, RankFusion achieves higher expected gains but at the cost of greater variance, while CAPA emerges as the most consistent strategy, outperforming standard UHerding on three out of four datasets.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00747
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CPR: Chained Perceptual Refinement for Coarse-to-Fine Medical Image Classification
2026-07-01 07:31:56Si-Yuan Lu, Hanruo Zhu, Ziquan Zhu, Gaojie Jin, Zeyu Fu, Lu Yin, Ke Li, Lu Liu, Tianjin HuangAbstract
High resolution medical images contain fine grained, spatially sparse cues that are critical for diagnosis, yet preserving full resolution incurs substantial computational and memory costs. Most deep models process images uniformly, leading to redundant computation or loss of diagnostic detail under downsampling. We propose Chained Perceptual Refinement, CPR, a coarse to fine framework that formulates medical image analysis as a sequential global to local decision process. Starting from a low resolution global view, CPR dynamically predicts the location and spatial extent of refinement regions, extracts high resolution evidence from the original image, and incrementally integrates it with global context. By keeping the backbone input size fixed while contracting the perceptual field, CPR preserves diagnostic fidelity with constant peak GPU memory. Extensive experiments on five medical imaging datasets and multiple backbone architectures demonstrate that CPR consistently outperforms both fixed resolution and multi scale state of the art baselines, achieving improvements of up to 2.27 percentage points over the second best method. It also achieves up to a 19.6 fold reduction in GFLOPs at matched accuracy, establishing a superior accuracy and efficiency trade off for high resolution medical image analysis. The code is available on GitHub.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02591
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MalariAI: A Label-Resilient Decoupled Framework for Universal Cell Segmentation and Explainable Stage Classification in Dense Malaria Blood Smears
2026-07-01 03:27:04Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Md Hasibul Hasan, Mohammed Ali, Tanzilur RahmanAbstract
Automated malaria diagnosis from blood smear microscopy is a critical challenge in global health AI; in resource-limited settings, the scarcity of expert microscopists remains the primary bottleneck to timely and accurate diagnosis. Three compounding failure modes prevent reliable clinical deployment of existing deep learning systems. First, end-to-end detectors treat unannotated cells as background during training, producing recall figures that are strongly influenced by annotation completeness rather than reflecting true cell recovery. Second, Non-Maximum Suppression tends to suppress valid detections in dense smear regions where infection counts matter most. Third, existing whole-slide detection pipelines lack per-cell spatial evidence for clinical audit, despite image-level explainability methods such as Grad-CAM having been applied to malaria image classification tasks. We present MalariAI, a two-stage decoupled framework that addresses all three failure modes in a unified pipeline. Stage 1 applies an annotation-agnostic distance-transform guided watershed algorithm to isolate every cell in a full 1600x1200 blood smear image, recovering 75.95% of ground-truth cells by centroid localisation across the 120-image NIH BBBC041 test set without any ground-truth input. Stage 2 fine-tunes EfficientNet-B0 with Focal Loss (gamma = 2.0, per-class inverse-frequency weights) on 64x64 crops, achieving 98.36% overall classification accuracy with 87.5% and 75.0% per-class accuracy on the rare schizont and gametocyte stages, compared to only 24.57% and 25.95% AP for a Faster R-CNN baseline on the same classes. Grad-CAM++ heatmaps generated per detected cell provide instance-level spatial evidence for clinical audit, enabling microscopists to verify model predictions at the individual parasite level without sacrificing classification performance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00385
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Scaling Up Thermodynamic AI Models
2026-06-30 20:44:57Andrew G. MooreAbstract
Thermodynamic computing devices based on the Ising model show great promise for low-power AI inference and edge computing, but scalable methods for training large models for such hardware remain limited. Prior theory shows that the time-averaged behavior of high-temperature Gibbs-sampled Ising systems can implement feed-forward neural inference. We turn this theoretical correspondence into a scalable and purely backpropagation-based algorithm for training deep convolutional networks for thermodynamic inference on Ising machine hardware. Our image classification models achieve accuracies of 94.9% on CIFAR-10 and 76.0% on CIFAR-100 under binary Gibbs sampling. We then develop and experimentally validate a mathematical theory relating inference cost to accuracy and controlling autocorrelation times. Subsequently, we calculate asymptotic results showing that inference cost is bounded by a well-controlled tradeoff with performance and exhibit algorithms for computing optimal inference schedules. Finally, we discuss implications for hardware development and the future of high-temperature thermodynamic AI models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00170
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Decompose, Compare, and Decide: Multimodal LLMs are Implicit Few-Shot Learners
2026-06-30 20:00:50Yunhan Wang, Eshika Khandelwal, Edson Araujo, Walid Bousselham, Nina Shvetsova, Hilde KuehneAbstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities when analyzing images, yet translating these capabilities to few-shot image classification remains challenging. To bridge this gap, we present DeCoDe, a simple yet effective technique that enables off-the-shelf MLLMs to act as strong few-shot classifiers without any additional training. Our approach builds on the idea of few-shot classification as a set of pairwise image comparisons, decomposing the task into a set of binary decisions. Given a query image and a support image from a candidate class, the MLLM is prompted to decide whether the two images depict the same class. The logit corresponding to an affirmative response is then used as a similarity score to assign the query image to the most likely class. While this already yields good results, we show that providing additional high-level information, such as the data domain, to the model further improves performance. Our evaluation provides an extensive analysis of various inference variants on a suite of twelve datasets, six established and six newly curated few-shot benchmarks spanning across diverse domains. The results show that the proposed simple decomposition technique can turn off-the-shelf MLLMs into powerful few-shot learners, significantly outperforming current state-of-the-art few-shot methods on both standard and novel domains. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00125
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