Image_Classification
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Beyond Landmark Extraction: A Framework for Robust Geometric Feature Construction in Structured Image Classification
2026-09-01 03:10:55Saravana Mauree, Sakshi AryaAbstract
Much of the literature on structured image recognition has disproportionately focused on the comparison of classification algorithms. Rather than investigating which classifier performs best, this paper instead asks: what should a classifier know before it ever makes a prediction? In structured vision problems such as gesture recognition, facial expression categorization, and medical image analysis, discriminative information lies less in individual pixels and more in spatial relationships between semantic parts. Raw pixel spaces are high-dimensional, sensitive to nuisance variation, and often obfuscate the geometric structures that make visual tasks interpretable. Landmark extraction provides one form of dimension reduction, but it does not by itself determine the information preserved. This paper studies the post-landmark feature map as the central object of analysis and proposes a systematic framework for constructing and interpreting landmark-derived representations as an, informed, feature-based ``dimension reduction'' step. Using static hand gesture recognition as a case study, we evaluate coordinate, distance, angle, and hybrid representations through perturbation and ablation experiments. The results show that visually variable data exposes substantial gaps between raw coordinate features and their geometrically invariant counterparts, while hybrid representations achieve the strongest overall performance by combining complementary geometric components. These findings frame feature construction as a fundamental modeling decision and ultimately suggests that the question of what representation should a classifier learn from is one worth asking. The code used for feature construction and evaluation is available at this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00634
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Whole-Body MRI Classification via Prompt-Based Clinical Conditioning
2026-08-31 14:03:41Laura Daza, Marta Hasny, Cristina Gonz\'alez, Julia A. SchnabelAbstract
Combining whole-body magnetic resonance imaging (WB-MRI) with clinical variables has the potential to improve systemic disease diagnosis by leveraging complementary sources of patient information. However, structured clinical variables are often incomplete or missing, limiting the applicability of conventional multimodal fusion methods that assume fixed inputs. In this work, we propose TACTIC (Tabular-Attribute Conditioned Transformer for Image Classification), a prompt-based multimodal framework that integrates WB-MRI and structured clinical data through conditional visual feature learning. By encoding clinical attributes as prompts, TACTIC supports an arbitrary number of tabular inputs and naturally handles missing data without requiring imputation or fixed input structures. We evaluate TACTIC on five WB-MRI classification tasks spanning systemic and oncologic applications, including diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), breast cancer, prostate cancer, and metastasis diagnosis. Across all tasks, TACTIC consistently improves performance over image-only baselines when clinical information is available while maintaining strong predictive capability under incomplete tabular inputs. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of prompt-based models as a flexible approach for improving WB-MRI analysis using clinical context. The model weights and code are available at this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30824
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Quantum-Grassmann-Plucker Token Mixing for Deep Learning-Based Post-Disaster Damage Assessment
2026-08-31 11:42:27Kooroush Farahkhah, Umut Lagap, Taha Rezaei, Saman GhaffarianAbstract
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.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30633
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ConCA: Concentration-Aware Channel Attention for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition
2026-08-31 03:07:59Yu-Sheng Liu, Yu-Chen TungAbstract
Lightweight channel attention mechanisms are widely used in image classification, yet their effectiveness in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) remains limited. Most modules summarize each channel by global average pooling (GAP), which captures activation magnitude but ignores spatial concentration, so channels with different spatial distributions but identical means receive the same descriptor. We propose Concentration-Aware Channel Attention (ConCA), which pairs the mean with a shift-invariant negative-input entropy (NegEnt), computed via a softmax over the negated activations, forming a dual descriptor that jointly encodes magnitude and concentration. A depthwise 1-D convolutional multi-layer perceptron (MLP), whose parameter count is linear in the number of channels, maps the pair to a per-channel weight. On six fine-grained benchmarks, ConCA improves over attention-free, SE-Net, and ECA-Net baselines as well as four richer descriptor-based modules under a controlled from-scratch protocol, and it generalizes across eight backbones on iNat2021-mini. These results indicate that the channel descriptor, together with the per-channel gating that maps it to attention weights, is an important but underexplored aspect of lightweight channel attention in FGVR.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30183
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OPAL: Orthonormal Prototype Alignment Learning for Interpretable Image Classification
2026-08-30 19:54:58Il\'an Carretero, Gustavo Jes\'us Angulo, Roc\'io del Amor, Valery NaranjoAbstract
Prototypical part-based models provide explainable predictions by comparing input regions to learned prototypes. However, current approaches are burdened by complex, multi-stage training pipelines and heavily rely on auxiliary regularization to prevent prototype collapse. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Orthonormal Prototype Alignment Learning (OPAL), a single-stage, end-to-end framework that simplifies interpretable classification. Our approach anchors the latent space using predefined orthonormal bases, embedding each class within a dedicated subspace spanned by fixed part-prototypes. To achieve precise part localization, OPAL enforces spatial competition across feature maps. This mechanism isolates sparse, discriminative regions, directing each prototype to consistently attend to the same semantic concept across different images. By framing classification as a direct representation alignment task, our method eliminates the need for auxiliary losses. Extensive experiments on fine-grained benchmarks demonstrate that OPAL outperforms both its non-interpretable counterparts and state-of-the-art part-prototype methods, delivering granular visual explanations by explicitly revealing the specific image regions driving every prediction. Code is available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30003
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On the Plasticity Collapse in Continual Machine Unlearning
2026-08-30 02:33:40Yingdan Shi, Xiang Xu, Kaize Ding, Alfred O. Hero, Ren WangAbstract
Machine unlearning enables deep neural networks to selectively remove the influence of specific data in response to privacy and regulatory requirements. While prior work largely studies single-shot unlearning, real-world systems must accommodate continual unlearning, where multiple unlearning requests occur sequentially over time. In this work, we identify a fundamental limitation of this setting: plasticity collapse, a progressive breakdown in a model's ability to effectively forget. Through theoretical analysis of continual unlearning dynamics, we show that continual unlearning operations accumulate geometric constraints in parameter space, leading to saturated subspaces that restrict future updates. This structural effect induces two distinct failure modes: (1) Forward failure -- diminishing forgetting quality for subsequent tasks, and (2) Backward failure -- spontaneous re-memorization of previously forgotten information. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures, datasets, and methods in image classification confirm that plasticity collapse is not an artifact of specific implementations, but a pervasive phenomenon inherent to continual unlearning. Our findings reveal a critical barrier to the long-term reliability of machine unlearning systems and motivate the development of plasticity-preserving unlearning algorithms. Our code is available at this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29513
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Temperature-Adaptive Transformed Teacher Matching
2026-08-29 07:08:26Hiroaki Aizawa, Yoshikazu HayashiAbstract
Temperature scaling is a core component of knowledge distillation, yet its role and effect are still not fully understood. Transformed Teacher Matching (TTM) clarifies the role of temperature scaling by applying it only to the teacher distribution and interpreting the resulting objective as standard distillation with an implicit Rényi entropy regularization on the student. However, TTM still relies on a fixed temperature and does not specify how the teacher-side temperature should be adapted for individual samples. In this paper, we introduce a sample-wise inverse-temperature update for TTM by locally minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the temperature-scaled teacher distribution and the student's prediction. We derive closed-form first and second derivatives with respect to the inverse temperature, and show that they can be expressed using variance and covariance statistics of centered teacher and student logits under the transformed teacher weighting. This yields an efficient curvature-aware update that requires one softmax evaluation and a constant number of class-wise weighted sums. Experiments on standard image classification distillation benchmarks show that our temperature adaptation generally improves TTM and WTTM, while remaining competitive with or outperforming prior temperature-adaptive distillation baselines.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29099
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Texture Image Classification Using DWT AlexNet Feature Fusion and Deep Neural Networks
2026-08-28 17:00:48Arun D. KulkarniAbstract
Texture image classification plays a significant role in computer vision applications, including industrial inspection, medical image analysis, remote sensing, and object recognition. Handcrafted features can capture local texture characteristics but may have limited capability to represent complex visual patterns. In contrast, deep learning models automatically learn discriminative representations but may not fully exploit the multiscale spatial-frequency information inherent in texture images. This paper proposes a hybrid feature fusion framework, termed DWT_AlexNet_DNN, which combines Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) features with deep features extracted using AlexNet for texture image classification.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28524
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Beyond Classification: Task-Dependent Learnability under Privacy-Motivated Image Transformations
2026-08-27 12:52:16Leon Ranke, Wolfgang H\"ubner, Ronny Hug, Michael Arens, J\"urgen BeyererAbstract
Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in computer vision often rely on noise or image perturbations to protect visual data while securely processing it, creating a trade-off between task performance and protection. This trade-off is commonly evaluated using image classification, which primarily captures semantic separability and remains robust despite significant geometric, spatial layout or local boundary alterations. As a result, it is too simplistic as a proxy for generic vision tasks. Exhaustive downstream-task evaluation, however, is computationally expensive because models must often be trained for each PET transformation and parameter setting. We therefore propose a compute-aware multi-task protocol for evaluating PETs in model training. It combines lightweight proxy tasks that target complementary aspects of visual structure while remaining simple and fast to compute. Across irreversible privacy transformations, key-based block primitives, and learnable image encryption schemes, we demonstrate that PETs with similar classification accuracy can differ substantially on other tasks. The outcomes highlight the need for PET evaluation protocols that move beyond classification-only reporting.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27066
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MVC-Bench: Benchmarking Calibration of Medical Vision-Language Models
2026-08-27 11:49:46Ashshak Sharifdeen, Shihab Aaqil Ahamed, Ufaq Khan, Muhammad Akhtar Munir Sujair Ibrahim, Mohamed Rafeek Mareer Ahamed, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Muhammad Haris KhanAbstract
Reliable evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) and medical vision-language models (Medical-VLMs) requires calibrated confidence, particularly under realistic clinical conditions. However, existing efforts mainly focused on improving accuracy, leaving calibration in the medical domain underexplored. To this end, we propose MVC-Bench, a calibration-centric benchmark for medical image classification with VLMs and Medical-VLMs. MVC-Bench assesses the calibration across three axes: (i) robustness to modality, backbone, and domain shift (ii) effectiveness of calibration strategies and prompt-tuning methods (iii) stability under prompt-template and random-seed variations. The benchmark covers eight different backbones, three medical modalities, including fundus imaging, histopathology, and chest X-ray under in-domain and domain shift settings. It compares post-hoc calibration, train-time calibration, and zero-shot inference methods, together with six prompt-tuning methods. Across more than 1638 controlled experiments, we report accuracy and Expected Calibration Error (ECE) as primary metrics, and further report results with complementary calibration measures, including Maximum Calibration Error (MCE) and Adaptive Calibration Error (ACE). We further investigate the underlying causes of miscalibration in VLMs and Medical-VLMs and propose a simple train-time calibration method, Multi-Class Margin (MCM) regularization, which achieves lowest ECE on 10 out of 12 settings in in-domain and remains competitive under domain shifts. Collectively, MVC-Bench provides a structured evaluation framework and actionable guidance for improving calibration in safety-critical medical workflows.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27004
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G2D: Generative-to-Discriminative Collaborative Inference for Zero-Shot Image Classification
2026-08-27 07:34:07Zehua Hao, Fang Liu, Qinliang Wang, Yaoyang Du, Xinyan Huang, Puhua ChenAbstract
Zero-shot classification needs efficient label retrieval and fine-grained visual reasoning, yet discriminative and generative vision-language models fail in complementary this http URL CLIP's top-1 prediction is wrong, the correct label often remains in its top-$K$ shortlist, making disambiguation rather than recall the key this http URL generative models, however, are hindered by large label spaces and unconstrained this http URL complementarity motivates separating broad candidate retrieval from fine-grained, image-grounded this http URL propose G2D, a training-free framework that uses a generative VLM to verify CLIP-retrieved candidates against the this http URL names and CLIP probabilities provide a structured prior for resolving visually similar this http URL confidence routing, entropy-adaptive candidate sizing, and trie-constrained decoding focus generative reasoning on uncertain samples and ensure one valid output for each input at test this http URL eight benchmarks, G2D achieves 68.85% average accuracy, versus 59.35% for CLIP and 63.11% for the standalone this http URL seven generator configurations, candidate-set verification improves average accuracy by 1.08--27.42 percentage points.G2D also transfers to DCLIP, WaffleCLIP, and CuPL, supporting a practical interface between discriminative proposal and generative visual reasoning. Code: this https URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26744
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Label-Free Foundational Model Selection for Medical Image Classification under Distribution Shift via Pseudo Label Discrepancy
2026-08-26 13:56:29Juan I\~naki Larrea, Lucas Mansilla, Enzo FerranteAbstract
Foundation models are increasingly deployed for medical image analysis. However, under the inter-institutional distribution shift typical of deployment, their performance varies widely and cannot be known without target-domain labels, which are rarely available. This leaves a practical question unresolved: given several candidate foundational models and labeled-data from a source domain, which one to deploy in an unlabeled target domain? We propose a label-free selection criterion built on SUDO, a framework for evaluating clinical AI systems without ground-truth annotations. SUDO partitions the unlabeled target data by predicted probability and, for each region, measures a pseudo-label discrepancy reflecting class contamination; aggregated across regions, this yields a score (AURCC) requiring neither target annotation nor fine-tuning. We show that AURCC can be used to rank a variety of vision-language models (BioMedCLIP, CXR-CLIP, CheXzero, MedCLIP, MedImageInsight, CLIP) on chest X-ray classification across three inter-hospital shift scenarios, under zero-shot and MLP-probe regimes. The AURCC ranking recovers the ground-truth ranking with Spearman rho up to 0.943 (p<0.05). Against the natural baseline of ranking by held-out source accuracy, AURCC is competitive when the labeled source is large and yields a more accurate ranking once it is small; the regime of interest in resource-constrained settings.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25810
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Learning from waste: Machine Learning for health risk prediction and computer vision-based sorting in Ghana
2026-08-26 13:06:35Hilda Adwubi Osei, Catherine Tenewaa Osei, Desdemona Yaa AsobayireAbstract
The inappropriate disposal of solid waste remains a significant public health and environmental concern worldwide, including in Ghana. Poor sanitation and improper waste management practices contribute to substantial economic costs and avoidable deaths annually. In 2022, a field study in Atonsu, Kumasi, Ghana, reported a community-perceived relationship between household waste disposal and illness patterns, but only through descriptive analysis without quantitative validation. This study extends that investigation using two data-driven approaches. First, a Random Forest classifier was developed to predict illness categories using waste disposal practices and demographic survey data. On a held-out group of respondents who reported illness (N=69), the model obtained a macro F1 score of 0.63, with disposal method emerging as the most important substantive predictor of illness type. Second, a MobileNetV2 image classification model enabled automated waste sorting via visual recognition, achieving 88.2% accuracy and a macro F1 score of 0.87 on the test set (N=415). The vision-based approach offers an affordable, camera-driven alternative to complex multi-sensor systems, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained settings. Taken together, the findings provide quantitative evidence for a community health relationship previously documented only qualitatively. They demonstrate the potential for automated waste-sorting in low-resource environments. Importantly, the results illustrate that technological performance alone does not guarantee public health improvements; effective institutional support and implementation are equally necessary.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25759
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Semi-Supervised Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Image Classification
2026-08-26 07:54:50Mohamed L. Mekhalfi, Mohamad M. Al Rahhal, Yakoub Bazi, Salah E. Khenfer, Mingdeng Shi, Hua Zou, Mansour ZuairAbstract
Vision-language models like CLIP have shown sig- nificant potential in handling natural images, yet their perfor- mance is often limited by the distinct characteristics of satellite imagery. While parameter-efficient adaptation techniques exist, their efficacy is frequently limited by the scarcity of annotated samples. In this letter, we propose Self-Evolutionary CLIP (SE- CLIP), a semi-supervised framework designed for recursive label mining in scene classification. The approach follows a dual-phase pipeline, where an initial warm-up on a few annotated seeds is followed by a recursive discovery phase that iteratively identifies high-confidence samples from unlabeled pools. To maintain the integrity of the evolving support set, we employ a class-balanced selection strategy that prevents the model from being dominated by easily learned categories. Results on the UCM and NWPU benchmarks indicate that SE-CLIP significantly outperforms existing semi-supervised approaches. The framework provides a viable solution for adapting VLMs to the remote sensing domain with minimal human intervention.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25485
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Interpretable Fundus Image Classification via Ring-Based Retinal Vasculature Features
2026-08-25 15:37:28Xiaoyan Li, Shixin Xu, Arvind Gupta, Huaxiong HuangAbstract
Retinal fundus photography is widely used for screening and monitoring ocular diseases, but many modern classification pipelines rely on deep latent representations and provide limited interpretability. This study develops an interpretable fundus image classification framework based on a ring-structured representation of the retinal vasculature centered on the optic disc. The method quantifies vessel geometry, color appearance, oxygenation-related vascular appearance, and vessel--background entropy within concentric retinal regions. These physiologically motivated descriptors are derived from vessel masks, image intensities, and optical-density measurements and aggregated across rings to capture spatial variation in vascular properties. Using only quantitative vascular descriptors, the proposed method achieved strong classification performance across three public fundus datasets. On HRF, it achieved 91.1\% accuracy using automatically generated vessel masks, matching RETFound, a vision transformer pretrained on large-scale retinal fundus image data, under the same evaluation setting. Additional analyses suggest that pretrained image models are sensitive to acquisition-related spatial cues, including fundus scale and retinal position within the field of view, as well as broader non-vessel image characteristics. This framework may support interpretable disease classification, quantitative retinal phenotyping, and retinal biomarker discovery without requiring large task-specific training datasets.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24723
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Representation Learning in Diffusion and Flow-based Model: An Application Aspect
2026-08-25 04:55:15Yanchen Xu, Sida Huang, Zhenyu Gu, Ruishu Zhu, Yilan Gao, Hongyuan ZhangAbstract
Diffusion models and flow-based models have recently become the dominant paradigms in generative modeling, largely due to their ability to learn rich, multi-level visual representations through large-scale training. This creates a bidirectional relationship between generative models and representation learning: improving representation learning enhances generation quality, while the learned representations can be leveraged for broader understanding tasks. This survey systematically explores this interplay with a focus on applications. We propose a three-tier progressive framework that organizes existing works from three perspectives: using representation learning to improve generative capabilities, exploiting generative models to extract representations for perception tasks, and ultimately moving toward general-purpose unified applications. We systematically categorize representative methods across a wide range of downstream tasks, including image classification, dense visual prediction, instance-level perception, and annotation-scarce scenarios. By providing a unified taxonomy and identifying key challenges, this survey aims to clarify the underlying logic of current research and suggest promising directions for future exploration. We hope this work can serve as a valuable reference for researchers interested in harnessing the representation power of generative models for applications beyond generation.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24068
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Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering for Visual Representation Learning
2026-08-24 00:01:09Jianan Wei, Guikun Chen, Zhiyuan Weng, Chunchao Guo, Yujia Wang, Wenguan WangAbstract
We investigate the token mixer in vision backbones by revisiting clustering, one of the most classic approaches in machine learning. An effective token mixer is a fundamental component of modern vision backbones like vision Transformers, facilitating information exchange between image patches. Mainstream token mixers, which rely on convolution, attention, MLP, or their hybrids, primarily focus on navigating the trade-off between accuracy and computational cost. However, a significant drawback of these methods is their black-box nature; their encoding process is opaque and lacks interpretability. Diverging from these opaque designs, we introduce ClusterMixer, a transparent token mixer that is grounded in a clustering paradigm and interpretable by design. ClusterMixer explicitly formulates the token mixing process through a hierarchical clustering mechanism. To model the natural, tree-like relationships inherent in visual data, the clustering is performed in hyperbolic space, which is well-suited for embedding hierarchies with low distortion. Building on this innovation, we present HCFormer, a new backbone architecture that integrates ClusterMixer with a series of meticulously designed clustering strategies to ensure robust performance across tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HCFormer consistently outperforms its counterparts across diverse tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Considering its transparency and efficacy, we hope HCFormer can facilitate a paradigm shift toward interpretable backbones.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22665
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Adapting Dense Vision-Language Relationships for Multi-label Classification with Partial Label
2026-08-23 09:20:30Cheng Chen, Yifan Zhao, Jia LiAbstract
Learning multi-label image classification with incomplete annotations is a challenging task that has been widely studied for its superior trade-off between high efficiency and less labor consumption on large-scale datasets. Predominant methods rely on strong prior assumptions to recover the missing semantics from partial annotations. However, these statistic priors suffer from unstable semantic mistakes and thus lead to catastrophic overfitting. Toward this end, we propose a Language-driven Dense Semantic Adaptor (LDSA) that excavates prior-adaptive relationships from multimodal pretrained CLIP models. In our approach, the densely contrastive adaptor is first proposed to construct dense visual contrastive constraints, transferring the task-specific knowledge to visual domains. We then propose a language-driven interactive decoder with the help of class-specific prompt tuning, which adapts language proxies with visual domains. With the collaborative learning of proposed modules, experimental results demonstrate our proposed LDSA achieves a new state of the art on public multi-label classification benchmarks, and interpretable analyses reveal that our LDSA discovers implicit semantic relationships with the prior-adaptive learning scheme.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22313
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CRS-Bench: A Reference-Relative Reliability Benchmark for Medical Image Encoders
2026-08-22 17:57:20Xingtao Lin, Hangqi Ren, Caiwan Sun, You ChenAbstract
Pretrained image encoders are central to medical image classification, where expert annotation is costly and task-specific cohorts are often limited. As the model space expands from general-purpose to broad-medical and specialty-specific encoders, selecting the representation becomes a substantive modeling decision. Clean-test discrimination alone is insufficient for this purpose: encoders with similar AUROC can differ in calibration, label efficiency, and stability under acquisition perturbations or distribution shift. We introduce CRS-Bench, a controlled benchmark for multi-objective medical encoder selection. CRS-Bench evaluates 15 pretrained encoder families across dermatology, ophthalmology, and radiology using ISIC 2019, APTOS 2019, and CheXpert, with CheXpert-to-MIMIC-CXR as an observed institutional shift, yielding 17,575 controlled run records and 3,515 seed-aggregated metric rows. Each encoder is characterized along four operational reliability dimensions: discrimination, calibration, label efficiency, and robustness. We summarize these dimensions using the Clinical Reliability Score (CRS), a Pareto-aware, reference-relative score combining dominance, profile balance, and worst-axis performance. AUROC and CRS are positively associated but not decision-equivalent: 21 of 105 pairwise orderings reverse, with a mean absolute rank displacement of 1.87. Paired-seed bootstrap analysis identifies PanDerm, MedSigLIP, and MedGemma as a stable leading reliability tier rather than a statistically resolved single leader. CRS-Bench provides a controlled framework for selecting medical image encoders from multi-axis reliability profiles rather than clean-test AUROC alone.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22059
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GuardPaint:SpeculativeSafetyDecodingforText-to-ImageGeneration
2026-08-22 09:28:30Shreyash Dhoot, Paras Dhiman, Arsh Abbas Naqvi, Aranbi Dutta, Aman Chadha, Vinija Jain, Amitava DasAbstract
Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models offer powerful visual generation, but their controllability creates a critical safety challenge: adversarial prompts can steer the denoising trajectory toward policy-violating content such as explicit nudity or graphic violence. Existing safeguards mostly act before generation through prompt filtering or after generation through image classification, leaving the diffusion process itself unguarded and often yielding only refusal rather than safe visual repair. We introduce GuardPaint, a speculative decoding framework for safe T2I generation that intervenes inside the diffusion trajectory without modifying the base model. A lightweight auditor monitors intermediate images, localizes unsafe regions, and triggers surgical inpainting repair only where needed. Candidate repairs are generated by a policy-aligned inpainter and selected through a guarded tournament that accepts edits only when they improve policy compliance while preserving prompt fidelity and perceptual quality. Across five jailbreak families SneakPrompt, MMA, PGJ, DACA, and RABell and UNet/flow-matching models including SD~1.5, SDXL, SD~3.5, and FLUX.1-dev. GuardPaint reduces attack success and harmful generations with minimal degradation to image quality, prompt fidelity, and benign behavior. Content warning: This paper contains examples involving nudity and violence that some readers may find disturbing, distressing, or offensive.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21869
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