Image_Classification
-
TrainBridge: Agentic NPU Training Optimization Guided by GPU Compilation Evidence
2026-10-21 04:00:48Yupeng Chen, Kunxiang Zhao, Xingjian Wang, Yue Zhao, Yijing Wu, Ye Liu, Kai Li, Congliang Chen, Ruoyu SunAbstract
We study how to improve training efficiency on Ascend NPUs. In the NPU training programs we study, framework-level compilation optimizations such as operator fusion are only partially applied, leaving fragmented computation and avoidable execution overheads. Profiling-guided tuning can address these inefficiencies, but it often requires costly trial and error. To make training on NPUs more efficient, we propose TrainBridge, an agentic approach for transferring GPU optimization guidance to NPU training. TrainBridge uses the highly optimized execution produced by mature GPU compilation stacks as a task-specific reference for NPU tuning. It extracts optimization intents from the GPU training execution to guide NPU program rewrites and further refines the rewritten program through iterative profiling. Our GPU-to-NPU migration experiments show that TrainBridge achieves an average 1.7x speedup across four workloads covering LLM pretraining, image classification, and vision-language training, and an average speedup of nearly 2.0x across 27 Modded-NanoGPT speedrun records with highly optimized GPU implementations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29171
PDF
-
Depth-guided Geometric Adaptation for Few-shot Image Classification
2026-10-20 19:29:42Zhiqi Miao, Estefan\'ia Talavera, Weichuan Zhang, Jiapan GuoAbstract
Few-shot image classification (FSIC) frequently suffers from visual ambiguity, where background clutter and RGB appearance similarities hinder discriminative feature matching in data-scarce settings. To mitigate this, we propose DAFIC, a geometry-guided framework that incorporates monocular depth into representation learning, episodic adaptation, and dense support-query matching. DAFIC first learns geometry-aware token representations through RGB-D self-supervised pre-training. Subsequently, the Depth-guided Geometric Adaptation (DGA) module uses depth-derived geometry to refine patch representations with geometry-enriched class context while suppressing background interference. Spatial Bidirectional Patch Matching (SBiM) then performs bidirectional dense matching on the refined features, reducing sensitivity to spurious correspondences and background clutter. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that DAFIC achieves strong performance against existing methods, with ablation and robustness analyses supporting the effectiveness of coupling geometry-conditioned episodic adaptation with bidirectional matching for few-shot visual recognition.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28856
PDF
-
Diversity Without Labels: Task-Agnostic Coreset Selection Across Perception and Action
2026-10-16 15:43:21Julia Hindel, Benjamin Ramtoula, Kyuhwan Yeon, Nick Heppert, Paul Newman, Daniele De Martini, Abhinav ValadaAbstract
While data collection for model training is relatively easy, curating high-quality datasets from large collections is inherently challenging. Coreset estimation methods address this problem by identifying the best data subsets to train models on. However, existing approaches often require proxy model training, extensive annotations, or task-specific tailoring. Unsupervised alternatives typically exploit geometric properties in foundation model feature spaces, but are limited to pairwise image-to-image comparisons or comparisons against a fixed subset. We introduce CoreDNA, an unsupervised, task-agnostic coreset estimation approach that pools neuron activations from vision foundation models into per-image and per-dataset distributions. By comparing each image's distribution to the dataset-level distribution, CoreDNA can capture both low-level visual structure and high-level semantic information across layers. We find that high-quality samples concentrate in the tails of the last layer's activation statistics, which we validate by relating them to training-based coreset methods. Building on these findings, we develop a computationally efficient selection mechanism to construct task-agnostic, high-quality coresets for selective annotation and model training. Across image classification, semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and imitation learning for end-to-end driving and mobile manipulation, CoreDNA matches or outperforms the state of the art, demonstrating unprecedented generalization across perception and action tasks. These results highlight the effectiveness of compact activation-based representations for data selection.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23642
PDF
-
A Topological Signature of Learning under Noisy Labels
2026-10-16 14:04:35Zhongtian Sun, Fan Mo, Prayag Tiwari, Kelin XiaAbstract
How does noisy supervision change the representations learned by a neural network? Training accuracy measures agreement with training labels but provides little information about representation geometry. We use persistent homology to track loop structure across distance thresholds in neural activations. Experiments span image classification, text classification, and modular arithmetic. On a fixed CIFAR-10/ResNet-18 training probe, equally sized clean-label and corrupted-label subsets show no detectable persistence difference at epoch 10, whereas corrupted-label subsets have higher persistence at epoch 50. The contrast survives uniform-scale controls, even though predictions match the assigned noisy labels for only 7-11% of corrupted probe examples at that checkpoint. Normalisation preserves the crossover between clean and noisy training trajectories on CIFAR-10/ResNet-18, whereas CIFAR-100/ResNet-18 shows no crossover under any of the five evaluated constructions. In a separate noise-rate calibration comparison across five pipelines, mean activation norm achieves a higher mean in-sample R2 than raw persistence (0.936 versus 0.908). These findings show that noisy supervision leaves a measurable geometric signature even when agreement with corrupted labels is low. Comparing persistence under scale controls with label-fitting measurements offers a way to study how representations respond to label corruption beyond what training accuracy reveals.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23491
PDF
-
Handwritten Text Recognition Lives in the High-Pixel Variance Subspace
2026-10-16 11:09:27Carlos Garrido-Munoz, Jorge Calvo-ZaragozaAbstract
In self-supervised pretraining for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), pixel reconstruction methods outperform contrastive methods, unlike in natural-image classification. We argue that this difference follows from where discriminative signal lies in pixel space: for HTR, it is concentrated in high-variance directions and largely absent from low-variance ones. This predicts that objectives preserving high-variance pixel content will transfer best. We test six SSL methods from three families (pixel-grounded MIM, JEPA, and contrastive) under matched encoder, data, and evaluation protocols on six handwriting benchmarks across five languages. With full labels, pixel-groundrounded SSL achieves the lowest CER on every benchmark and both frozen probes, exposes per-position character information that other families recover only through the readout, and is the only family to benefit from pretraining on real handwriting. Pixel-grounded representations are also more label efficient. Across datasets, encoder alignment with the high-variance pixel subspace predicts CER within every method. With a pretrained LLM decoder, a frozen pixel-grounded encoder is competitive with fully fine-tuned supervised baselines; full fine-tuning achieves the lowest mean CER and ranks first or second on every benchmark. These results show that the value of pixel reconstruction depends on where discriminative signal lies in the input.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35473
PDF
-
SpikeQ: Spike-Guided Post-Training Quantization for Spiking Neural Networks
2026-10-16 07:24:52Kai Sun, Peibo Duan, Zhanglu Yan, Guowei Zhang, Yongsheng Huang, Levin KuhlmannAbstract
On neuromorphic chips, spiking neural networks (SNNs) consume far less energy than artificial neural networks (ANNs), but the limited memory of these chips requires low-bit synaptic weights and membrane potentials. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods provide them without retraining and, like those for ANNs, minimize numerical errors such as the mean squared error (MSE). In an SNN, however, a quantization error reaches later layers only through the spikes it flips. We find that errors of equal MSE can cause very different accuracy losses, whereas errors that flip the same fraction of spikes cause the same loss. We therefore propose SpikeQ, a spike-guided PTQ framework. For weights, we select the level of each weight by simulating the downstream neurons and minimizing their spike errors. For membrane potentials, most existing methods quantize the state after the reset, whereas neuromorphic chips compare the threshold with the membrane potential stored at a fixed bit width. We target this pre-fire quantization and build a reset-aware grid that places the threshold on a rounding boundary, so rounding never flips the spike at the current time step. We evaluate SpikeQ on seven benchmarks of image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. With 2-bit pre-fire membrane potentials, every existing grid collapses, whereas SpikeQ retains most of the full-precision accuracy. With both at 4 bits, the models stay within 2.59 points of full precision, shrink their memory footprint 7.8--7.9 times, and use 6.4--6.9 times less energy.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23046
PDF
-
Beyond Generation: Using Multimodal LLMs as Detectors of LLM-Generated Deepfake Facial Images
2026-10-15 12:16:09Olivia Salamon, Virginia N. L. Franqueira, Shujun LiAbstract
As image generation models become increasingly capable of producing highly realistic content, traditional forensic techniques are struggling to keep up. This paper investigates whether MLLMs can instead be used as a form of forensic analysis by identifying synthetic media. Specifically, the study aims to determine whether these models detect fake images by recognising physical inconsistencies, or whether they rely on digital artefacts such as embedded this http URL MLLMs: GPT-4o, GPT-5, GPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5, Gemini 3, and Seed 1.6, are benchmarked using a dataset of 400 images. Fifty images are authentic photographs, while the remaining 350 are generated using seven leading image models: Gemini 3, Gemini 2.5, Flux.2 Pro, GPT-Image-1, GPT-Image-1.5, Seedream 4.0, and Seedream 4.5. The evaluation is structured in three stages: single-image classification, pairwise comparison, and a focused "self-detection" experiment on Gemini. Several MLLMs achieved a high detection accuracy, with GPT-5.2 reaching a peak of 97.9% in the pairwise experiment, against specific generators and an overall mean pairwise accuracy of 82.5% by identifying structural or physical inconsistencies within images. However, results from the self-detection experiment indicate that the presence of invisible SynthID watermarks leads to a 10% reduction in Gemini's detection accuracy compared to the clean control group. One possible explanation is that SynthID embedding reduces some of the visible artefacts the models rely on for this http URL results imply that MLLMs can detect structural artefacts without relying on watermarks, but performance varies substantially across model generations. The findings from comparison C5 also suggest that SynthID embedding may suppress some of the structural artefacts used during detection.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21760
PDF
-
CoViG: Coarsened Vision GNN for Image Classification
2026-10-15 06:11:57Martial Guidez, Stefan Duffner, Christophe GarciaAbstract
Although Graph Neural Networks are widely used in various domains, they remained mostly unexplored in computer vision. Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers were leading the field, until the quite recent introduction of Vision Graphs (ViG) that treat images as a set of nodes and apply graph convolution on their k-NN graphs. ViGs show impressive accuracy on image classification but their computational cost remains relatively high. Inspired by optimization methods for GNNs, we present CoViG, a novel approach combining graph coarsening and ViGs. Our method introduces an additional MinCUT pooling step within the Grapher component of intermediate ViG blocks. By simplifying the intermediate graphs and thus decreasing the number of nodes of specific blocks, our approach considerably reduces the computational cost of ViG during inference. We evaluated our approach on ImageNet with several ViG architectures, and we obtained accuracies equivalent to the original ViG models with only about 51\% of FLOPs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21321
PDF
-
Mind the Tail: Data Selection Through Sparse Concepts
2026-10-14 23:00:43Ziheng Zhang, Neha Hulkund, Colin Lee, Zheda Mai, Hui Shen, Ying Ding, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Sara Beery, Wei-Lun Chao, Jianyang GuAbstract
Data selection reallocates training support across visual concepts, including objects, attributes, color, texture, and backgrounds. Different allocation strategies may produce varied downstream model behavior, especially for tail concepts supported by only a few samples. Discarding them can hurt test-time robustness, while overemphasizing samples lying on category boundaries may introduce unstable training signals. This work explicitly investigates this relationship across fine-grained, spurious-correlation, and general image classification, as well as multimodal pretraining. Specifically, we use sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to extract concept activations from individual images. During selection, we accumulate the dataset-level concept support for each added sample. Applying diminishing returns to this distribution down-weights well-represented concepts and shifts the focus to the distribution tail. We then incorporate local support to find samples that reliably strengthen under-supported concepts. Empirical results show consistent improvements over strong data selection baselines across all benchmarks. We also reveal the connection between concepts our method enhances and the induced behavioral changes, including improved robustness against out-of-distribution and spurious contexts. This work establishes concept support, beyond individual sample importance, as a useful principle for data-efficient and robust learning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21007
PDF
-
Dataset-Level Regularization for Joint-Embedding Self-Supervised Learning
2026-10-14 13:13:48Konstantinos Almpanakis, Anna KreshukAbstract
Self-supervised joint embedding learning aligns representations of augmented views while regularizing their distribution to prevent collapse. Regularization aims to shape the overall representation distribution, but most joint embedding methods restrict its computation to the active minibatch. We propose out-of-batch regularization, which maintains a dataset-level state in CPU memory and uses globally constructed per-instance targets during minibatch training. Evaluated on natural images and biomedical datasets, these anchors approximate the full-dataset regularization gradient more faithfully than conventional minibatch estimation at small batch sizes. Applications to contrastive (SimCLR) and non-contrastive (SIGReg) approaches show consistent improvement over the corresponding in-batch objectives for image classification, minority-class performance under controlled imbalance, instance retrieval, and continued self-supervised pretraining, with the largest gains at small batch sizes. These results suggest that dataset-level regularization can be decoupled from minibatch optimization, making batch size an optimization choice that does not affect the geometry of the regularizer.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20158
PDF
-
Riding the Fixed-Point Curve: Image Classification in the Continuous Thought Machine
2026-10-13 21:36:28Thomas HannaganAbstract
The Continuous Thought Machine (CTM) is a recurrent network that attends to inputs and makes predictions based on the synchronization between its neurons. On tasks spanning many domains, it displays emergent thought processes that have not been explained. We report a number of findings about how the CTM classifies images, focusing on ImageNet. Each thinking step is an attracting but strongly non-normal map exhibiting balanced amplification (Murphy and Miller, 2009); while attraction is already present at CTM initialization, training highly promotes non-normality. By Banach's theorem, the neural state has a locally unique attracting fixed point, which moves at every step, and the thought trajectory is the curve these fixed points trace, followed one tick behind. Most of that curve's motion is shared across images, and visible as a previously reported traveling wave of activity across neurons. The attention schedule along the thought is largely generic: shuffling queries across images at every tick costs only 7 percent of classification accuracy, while image-independent increments predict the next query with R^2 = 0.98 (held out). Our results suggest that the CTM has found a single strategy to process all ImageNet images.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19220
PDF
-
Bottlenecked semantic compression by representation reconstruction
2026-10-12 21:24:38Xiaoya Tang, Shilong Liu, Daniel Smolyak, Xiwen Li, Quynh Nguyen, Tolga TasdizenAbstract
Vision Transformers incur high computational costs when processing long visual token sequences. Existing reduction methods typically rank tokens independently and discard those deemed unimportant or redundant. We propose a reconstruction-guided framework for visual token condensation (ReConV), which summarizes the complete visual sequence with a compact Summary Bank (SMB) and retains tokens whose information is not adequately captured by the SMB, as indicated by their reconstruction residuals. At each compression layer, a lightweight position-conditioned decoder reconstructs the current tokens, leaving shared information compressed in the SMB while explicitly preserving poorly reconstructed details. Experiments on image classification and multimodal understanding demonstrate favorable performance-efficiency trade-offs: ReConV surpasses the uncompressed baseline with 48\% fewer GMACs on ImageNet and enables reusable image-level representations for efficient multi-turn inference. Code is available at TokenDrop.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17412
PDF
-
Protein Crystallization Segmentation and Classification Using Subordinate Color Channel in Fluorescence Microscopy Images
2026-10-11 02:33:49Truong X. Tran, Marc L. Pusey, Ramazan S. AygunAbstract
The accuracy of detecting protein crystals for fluorescence microscopy images is very critical for high throughput and automated systems. Although the trace fluorescent labeling method could highlight protein crystals, reflection and emission from the fluorescence dye is not always due to crystal regions. Therefore, the analysis of the peak wavelength in the emission spectra of a fluorophore may not always yield effective results. In this paper, we show that using the subordinate color intensity corresponding to longer wavelengths than the peak wavelength of the emission spectra could improve the accuracy of protein crystal detection. Hence, we have built a segmentation method based on the percentile intensity of the subordinate color for trace fluorescently labeled (TFL'd) protein crystallization trial images. Compared to using the dominant color channel, our segmentation method on subordinate color channel was able to reduce the misclassification rate of likely-leads or crystals as non-crystals by the percentage of from 9.71% to 2.02% depending on the classifier. Similarly, the accuracy of classifiers were increased by the percentage of from 1.77% to 5.53%. Our method reached around 94% accuracy while keeping misclassification of likely-leads and crystals as non-crystals below 1%. Moreover, to evaluate the generalizability of our method, we have conducted new wet lab experiments on two proteins, Concanavalin A (Con A) and Ab inorganic pyrophosphate (AbIPPase), and the misclassification rate was below 1%. Our experiments show that using the subordinate channel may be more helpful for TFL'd protein trial image classification.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15286
PDF
-
VLCQ: Post-training quantization for deep neural networks using variable length coding
2026-10-10 18:02:45Reem Abdel-Salam, Ahmed H. Abdel-Gawad, Amr G. WassalAbstract
Quantization plays a crucial role in efficiently deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained devices. Post-training quantization does not require access to the original dataset or retraining the full model. Current methods that achieve high performance close to baseline results typically require INT8 fixed-point integers. However, achieving higher model compression with lower bit-widths often leads to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose VLCQ, a post-training quantization method that relaxes the fixed-point encoding constraint, enabling more flexible exploration of quantization techniques through variable-length encoding. This approach achieves competitive or improved performance while reducing bit-widths, without requiring access to training data or model fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on image classification, segmentation, and object detection demonstrate that VLCQ improves model compression and accuracy compared with state-of-the-art post-training quantization approaches. For per-channel quantization, VLCQ surpasses FP32 accuracy and Piece-Wise Linear Quantization (PWLQ) on most evaluated models, achieving up to 6x compression compared with FP32 and up to 1.7x compared with PWLQ. When prioritizing compression with limited accuracy loss, VLCQ achieves up to 12.25x compression compared with FP32 with less than 4% performance degradation. For per-tensor quantization, VLCQ is competitive with Data-Free Quantization (DFQ), while providing greater flexibility to achieve lower bit rates across different tasks and models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15092
PDF
-
Improving Semantic Coverage in AI Test & Evaluation through Generative Augmentation
2026-10-09 14:57:12Connor Hashemi, Bharadwaj Ravichandran, Connor Anderson, Shitij Govil, Brandon RichardWebster, Brian Hu, Keith FieldhouseAbstract
In test and evaluation (T&E) of AI models, evaluators typically have access only to a held-out test dataset and no knowledge of the training data or its semantic composition. If critical input conditions---such as time-of-day, weather, or scene location---are underrepresented in this test dataset, T&E results can be misleadingly due to this semantic coverage gap. We propose a three-stage generative AI pipeline to detect and fill such semantic gaps without requiring ground-truth labels of these semantics. First, vision-language models (VLMs) perform zero-shot binary labeling of semantic factors, and an embedding-space clustering step identifies which semantics most affect downstream model behavior. Second, diffusion-based image-to-image models transform existing covered images into the underrepresented semantic domain, preserving scene content while augmenting high-level appearance. Third, statistical analysis of the augmented image embeddings verifies that the synthetic imagery improves dataset coverage before it is incorporated. Crucially, the synthetic data is used only to enrich the test set and no model retraining is performed for T&E. We validate the full pipeline on both image classification and object detection under day/night semantic gaps, showing that the augmented test datasets better distinguish models with and without exposure to the missing semantic, thereby yielding T&E conclusions that more closely match those of an ideal, fully covered dataset. Code available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13697
PDF
-
Can Multimodal Decision Models Classify Breast Ultrasound Images? Benchmarking CLEF and CLEF-Flash Across Prompts and Datasets
2026-10-09 14:41:00Tran Cao Minh, Hai Tran, Ha Minh TanAbstract
Multimodal decision models return probabilities over predefined alternatives, offering a structured interface for image classification. This study benchmarks inference with CLEF and CLEF-Flash on 2818 breast ultrasound images from Dataset B, BUSI, and BUS-BRA. Dataset B and BUS-BRA use binary benign-malignant classification, whereas BUSI includes normal, benign, and malignant categories. Model parameters remain unchanged, and original images are submitted without user-defined preprocessing. Three prompts provide minimal labels, an explicit classification task, or sonographic criteria. We report accuracy, macro F1, balanced accuracy, macro precision, throughput, and latency. CLEF-Flash with the clinical prompt achieves the highest accuracy on all three datasets: 74.85% on Dataset B, 66.28% on BUSI, and 51.63% on BUS-BRA. On BUSI, however, CLEF with the task-guided prompt achieves the highest macro F1 (64.51%) and balanced accuracy (68.72%). CLEF-Flash has lower latency in every matched comparison. Clinical instructions improve CLEF-Flash accuracy relative to the minimal prompt but reduce CLEF accuracy on all datasets. Confusion matrices reveal frequent benign-to-malignant errors, particularly on BUS-BRA, where all configurations fall below the 67.63% accuracy of a majority-class predictor. These findings demonstrate dataset-and prompt-dependent performance and motivate class-specific evaluation before applying multimodal decision models to breast ultrasound analysis.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13675
PDF
-
Do Not Train Away Uncertainty: Early Uncertainty Anchored Calibration
2026-10-08 14:34:26Yutong Xie, Jiawei Tang, Zhenglin Hua, Yuxiang Ma, Si Qin, Yaxin Hou, Hui Liu, Junhui Hou, Yuheng JiaAbstract
Deep neural networks, including large language models, have achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, they are prone to overconfidence during training or fine-tuning. In this work, we observe a consistent phenomenon across different models that the early model is better calibrated, while later training or fine-tuning yields marginal accuracy gains but substantially increases calibration errors. Our analysis suggests that the early model retains uncertainty awareness in both its predictions and features, which is gradually lost with continued training. To avoid training away this uncertainty awareness, we propose \textbf{EUA-Cal}, a novel method that exploits the \textbf{E}arly model as an \textbf{U}ncertainty \textbf{A}nchor for \textbf{Cal}ibration. EUA-Cal introduces early prediction regularization to preserve early predictive uncertainty and prototype structure regularization to exploit uncertainty reflected in the early feature space, jointly mitigating overconfidence. Extensive experiments on image classification and multiple-choice question answering across eight diverse models demonstrate that EUA-Cal outperforms state-of-the-art calibration methods.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12048
PDF
-
HAND: A Biologically-Inspired Activation Function that Improves Generalisation and Sample Efficiency in Image Classification
2026-10-08 09:03:00Michael W. Spratling, Heiko H. Sch\"uttAbstract
DNNs exhibit robustness and generalisation issues not seen in humans. They are also far less data-efficient learners, requiring considerably more training samples to accurately classify novel exemplars. Inductive bias could help with these issues by providing in-built mechanisms to improve generalisation, and hence, reduce reliance on learning from data. We incorporate a biologically-inspired inductive bias into a new activation function, HAND (Homeostasis, Accelerating Nonlinearity, and Divisive-nomalisation), and show its effectiveness with CNNs trained on image classification. Using HAND a ConvNeXt-tiny required 25 training epochs to reach the same accuracy on ImageNet1k as the unmodified model achieved after 200 epochs. Consistent with the effects of an inductive bias, the performance gap reduced with training time and increased data augmentation. When the volume of training data was reduced and unevenly distributed between classes (Long-tailed ImageNet) the improvements in accuracy were even larger and did not reduce with increased training time. Generalisation performance with the common-corruptions data, and the ability to reject samples from unknown classes, were unaffected or improved by HAND. Results generalised across CNN architectures and training data-sets. HAND can, therefore, reduce the required training time and/or the required volume and variety of training data, helping to improve sample efficiency.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11534
PDF
-
Contrast Enhancement or Noise Reduction? On Improving Cervical Cancer Classification
2026-10-08 01:57:18Ach Khozaimi, Ulfatun NahdhiyahAbstract
Purpose: Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Deep learning has shown promising performance in medical image classification. The influence of image preprocessing algorithms on classification performance remains insufficiently investigated in the literature. This research aims to evaluate the impact of image preprocessing algorithms on the performance of CNNs for Pap smear image classification. Methods: Three CNN architectures (ResNet-34, MobileNet-V2, and DenseNet-121) were trained and evaluated using the SIPaKMeD dataset. Two preprocessing algorithms were applied: the PMD filter for noise reduction and CLAHE for contrast enhancement. The model performance was assessed using a confusion matrix. Results: Preprocessing improved the classification performance of all models. CLAHE significantly increased the accuracy of ResNet-34 from 76.73% to 84.16% and DenseNet-121 from 76.73% to 84.16%. The PMD filter yielded limited improvement and slightly reduced the MobileNet-V2 performance. Novelty: This research provides a systematic comparison of contrast enhancement and noise reduction techniques across CNN architectures. This research demonstrates that contrast enhancement is more effective than noise reduction in improving CNN performance. The research provides new pipelines for improving cervical cancer classification.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11086
PDF
-
FedSSMCoOp: SSM Encoders for light-weight Federated Prompt Learning for Few-shot Classification
2026-10-07 12:00:59Ankita Das, Ambarish Parthasarathy, Sumohana S. Channappayya, C. Krishna MohanAbstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance across a wide range of downstream vision tasks, thanks to the complementary information contained in the respective domains. Despite the performance gains, most of these approaches rely on aligning these domains using the cosine similarity metric, which fails to capture token-level structure and cross-modal interactions prior to the classification stage. This is especially critical in biomedical applications under federated constraints, where data sharing is restricted, labeled data is scarce at each site, and it differs widely across institutions, leading to substantial statistical heterogeneity. To overcome this issue, we propose FedSSMCoOp, a federated few-shot image classification framework that enables multimodal learning while preserving data privacy. With the help of the SSM-based Vision Mamba and Cross Mamba blocks, and by optimizing only the soft-prompt and communication-prompt updates in the federated setting, the framework prioritizes both computation and performance. Importantly, this eliminates the need to use an external Large Language Model (LLM) for feature alignment. The framework is further trained and evaluated on various biomedical image datasets, and its performance is assessed. The proposed framework delivers stable performance relative to the baselines and is, on average, 1.96 times lighter. The corresponding script will be made available soon.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09907
PDF
