Patrick Zimmer, Michael Halstead, Chris McCoolcs.CV cs.RO
Labelling vision datasets, especially for segmentation tasks, is a laborious and costly process that stymies novel developments in agricultural robotics. In this paper, we present DropClick, a click-guided segmentation tool that simplifies the annotation process. Our system utilises single-click inputs on objects to generate pseudo-labels, which can replace manual annotations. DropClick stands out as it is a semi-automated approach and does not require a click for every object in the scene. It can therefore further reduce the required amount of user input drastically. We evaluate our method on two challenging agricultural robotic datasets, SB20 and BUP20 for plant and fruit segmentation, respectively. DropClick is first trained on a small subset of just 5 images from the original training data. This DropClick model can then be deployed as a one-click segmentation system and achieves comparable or higher performance than other one-click methods achieving an mIoU of 70.0 and 72.6 points, for SB20 and BUP20 respectively. DropClick then excels at maintaining high performance when clicks are not given (e.g. dropped); when 50% of the clicks are missing it still maintains an mIoU of 68.9 and 71.3 points, for SB20 and BUP20 respectively. We validate DropClick as a pseudo-labelling approach by taking its outputs to train a Mask2Former instance-based segmentation model in a semi-supervised manner. In this process, partially removing user input from DropClick yields similar high performance when compared to providing all clicks, at 70.1 vs 70.7 points AP50 for SB20 and no difference for BUP20 at 77.0 for both models; at the same time saving 46.3% of total input for SB20 and 31.9% for BUP20.
Athira J. Jacob, Puneet Sharma, Daniel Rueckertcs.CV
Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging provides complementary information on cardiac anatomy, function, and tissue characterization across multiple sequences and views. In this work, we investigate foundation model pretraining for 2D CMR and introduce CMRVision, a CMR-specific foundation model trained using DINOv3-style self-supervised learning on a multi-center, multi-sequence cohort of 36 million CMR images. We systematically evaluate architectural and training design choices for domain-specific pretraining. CMRVision is evaluated on two downstream tasks: multi-task segmentation across cine, late gadolinium enhancement (LGE), and mapping sequences, and cine view classification. Our experiments show that CMR-specific pretraining, smaller patch sizes, and patch-level objectives consistently improve downstream performance. Across a multi-task segmentation benchmark, CMRVision achieved the strongest overall performance, outperforming prior natural-image (NI), medical-image, supervised, and CMR foundation model baselines. Improvements were modest but consistent across structures and sequences, with Dice scores ranging from 0.940-0.967 for LV and 0.855-0.905 for myocardium, and reaching 0.929 for RV, 0.920 for LA, and 0.931 for RA. The largest gains were observed for myocardium segmentation in LGE and mapping images. In a zero-shot segmentation task on unseen LGE long-axis views, the model achieved an average Dice score of 0.692, demonstrating cross-view generalization. For cine view classification, CMRVision achieved the highest average accuracy (0.906), compared to prior methods reported in the literature. These results highlight the potential of CMRVision to support robust and generalizable cardiac MRI analysis across multiple sequences and views.
Functional tissue units (FTUs), including tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs), blood vessels, and glands, encode localized immune, vascular, and epithelial organization in histopathology. Accurate quantification of these structures is important for studying tissue architecture and disease-associated tissue organization. However, FTUs are frequently sparse, heterogeneous, and surrounded by large amounts of morphologically similar background tissue, making automated segmentation in whole-slide images (WSIs) challenging. We therefore developed FTU-Seek, a pathology foundation model-guided framework that treats morphology-aware negative-patch selection as a key component of sparse FTU segmentation. FTU-Seek uses frozen multi-depth features from the UNI pathology foundation model to train a patch-level classifier that distinguishes FTU-containing from FTU-absent tissue. Target-absent patches are subsequently ranked according to their predicted target-containing probabilities, and the highest-scoring hard negatives are selected through a static Top$K$ strategy to construct compact segmentation training sets. The framework was evaluated using five-fold cross-validation and internal test cohorts across TLS, blood-vessel, and gland segmentation tasks, with an additional independent 30-WSI held-out cohort for TLS. Positive-only, all-tissue, random-negative, and matched random Top$K$ sampling strategies served as comparators. Segmentation-derived phenotypes were further explored in external TCGA cohorts.
Promptable segmentation foundation models such as SAM3 accept an open-vocabulary text concept and return every instance matching it, but adapting them to a specialized domain by full fine-tuning is computationally prohibitive for the organizations that would benefit most. This study applies Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to SAM3 for multi-class structural defect segmentation and examines both how such a model can be supervised from conventional annotation and whether the resulting efficiency gain transfers across datasets. Two contributions are methodological. First, we describe a supervision procedure that trains a concept-promptable model directly from COCO-style class-labeled instance segmentation by using the category name itself as the prompt, requiring no prompt templates, no synonym expansion, and no learned class embeddings. Second, we identify and mitigate a failure mode specific to this setting: because a conventional annotation file yields positive prompts exclusively, the model's presence prediction decouples from the text condition and degenerates into responding to any prompt, a collapse that is invisible to every metric computed on positive prompts alone. Exhaustive hard-negative prompting, in which every dataset category absent from an image is issued as a zero-detection query, addresses this at no annotation cost. Two adapter placements were compared under an identical protocol, updating 0.121% and 1.341% of model parameters. On a purpose-built tunnel lining dataset, pixel intersection-over-union improved from 0.017 to 0.338 and instance-level recall from 0.375 to 0.672; on the independent public Structural Defects Dataset, from 0.017 to 0.855 and from 0.574 to 1.000. Improvements were directionally consistent across ten metrics on both datasets, and the largest per-category gains occurred precisely where zero-shot competence was absent.
Verifying image authenticity is increasingly difficult, posing serious risks across journalism, law enforcement, and political domains. Most existing forensic methods rely on high-level visual artifacts and treat frame detection as a simple binary task. To address this, we propose SegWave, a hybrid framework that jointly leverages spatial and frequency-domain cues for image tampering detection. SegWave integrates a transformer-based architecture with the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to capture localized, multi-scale frequency inconsistencies indicative of manipulation. To further improve localization effectiveness, we introduce an Adaptive Sub-band Attention module (ASA) that dynamically highlights the informative high-frequency wavelet components. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SegWave consistently outperforms state-of-the-art tampering detection methods in challenging evaluation settings.
Industrial anomaly detection is a critical component of modern manufacturing. Most traditional unsupervised methods rely on modelling normal feature distributions, inherently limiting generalization to unknown categories. To improve generalizability, some recent methods incorporate vision-language models (VLMs) for zero-shot detection via text prompts. However, we observe that reasoning-oriented post-training can cause anomaly discrimination to collapse, with some fine-tuned models performing worse than their base VLMs. Existing methods also provide only textual decisions or coarse boxes, without pixel-level segmentation. A more explicit detection principle comes from human inspection: anomalies are identified by comparing a query image with a defect-free reference. Inspired by this, we propose InspectorGPT, a VLM framework centered on comparative reasoning. Given a normal reference and a query image, InspectorGPT compares them to identify discrepancies and perform multiple inspection tasks with detailed reasoning. We internalize this capability through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with tailored, verifiable rewards. We further introduce InspectorGPT-Seg for pixel-level anomaly masks. Segmentation supervision improves anomaly discrimination but weakens semantic reasoning, while joint training fails to balance them. We therefore train the two branches separately and combine them through task-vector fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior multi-dimensional performance and generalization to unseen benchmarks, validating comparative reasoning for comprehensive industrial inspection.
Olivier Bernard, William A. Romero R., Cyprien Bouton +24eess.IV cs.CV
Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is the modality of choice to assess myocardial infarction (MI) lesions. Nowadays MI volume quantification is not performed routinely in clinical practice. Numerous deep learning (DL) methods have been developed to automate the segmentation of the myocardium and infarct regions. However, most studies rely on relatively small datasets which typically undergo pre-processing steps to standardize images and focus on a specific phase of myocardial infarction following reperfusion therapy. These limitations have impeded the development of models that are generalizable across diverse conditions and thus suitable for routine clinical use. To advance research and establish benchmarks in generalizable learning for myocardial infarct quantification, this paper presents findings from the Myocardial Segmentation with Automated Infarct Quantification (MYOSAIQ) challenge. The dataset set up for the challenge combines 439 CMR volumes from two multicenter clinical trials, with representative data acquired in acute and chronic phases after acute MI. Data were acquired in 16 centers using MRI scanners from three different vendors. Six teams participated until the end of the challenge, employing various baseline models, data augmentation techniques, and confidence strategies. To enhance the significance of this study, we compare the challengers' results with those of fine-tuned foundation models. Our results indicate that well-designed UNet-based techniques outperform fully automatic foundation models for LGE MR segmentation. While the best methods achieve high-quality and stable delineations of the left ventricle and myocardium under various conditions, they remain improvable in accurately segmenting infarct regions.
Robustness of segmentation models is commonly assessed through input-domain perturbations, while dependence on frequency content within learned feature representations remains less understood. We probe this dependence using targeted post-training low-pass interventions on internal representations of three segmentation architectures, ResNet50-UNet (CNN), VM-UNet (SSM), and Swin-UNETR (Transformer), across CVC-ClinicDB and ISIC2018, with headline evaluations performed on untouched held-out test sets. At cutoff rho=0.25, feature-domain low-pass filtering causes severe degradation on CVC: Dice drops by 100%, 73.2%, and 30.9% for CNN, SSM, and Transformer, respectively, compared with 9.4%, 10.3%, and 0.6% on ISIC. The cross-dataset difference is statistically significant for every architecture. Single-stage interventions further show that sensitivity is localized at architecture-specific depths: the CNN peaks at a mid/late encoder block, whereas the SSM peaks in an early encoder stage on both datasets. Native feature-domain spectral measurements show an inverse association between high-frequency energy and fragility on CVC; the relationship is only partial on ISIC and is therefore treated as a candidate correlate rather than a proven mechanism. Finally, Fourier augmentation improves robustness to input-space low-pass filtering but leaves feature-domain degradation essentially unchanged. These results show that feature-spectral robustness is strongly dataset-dependent, architecture-specific, and distinct from input-domain spectral robustness.
Savvas Saragiotis, Pieter C. Gort, Lotte J. S. Fleurkens-Ewals +5eess.IV cs.CV
Deep learning segmentation models are often evaluated using geometric metrics such as Dice, HD95, and ASD, yet it remains unclear to what extent improvements in these metrics translate into clinically meaningful changes in downstream decision-making. The metric-to-decision gap is examined using radiological Peritoneal Cancer Index (rPCI) region segmentation on contrast-enhanced CT, where a consensus definition provides anatomically grounded 3D regions and the clinically used PCI 20 threshold enables decision-level evaluation. Inter-observer variability is quantified across four experts on ten abdominal CT scans, and a published nnU-Net based rPCI segmentation model is benchmarked against this human reference using Dice, HD95, and ASD across all 13 regions. To relate geometric differences to clinical impact, a probabilistic peritoneal metastasis simulation is implemented on majority-vote rPCI maps, propagating region-boundary variability into variability of derived (r)PCI scores and classification at the PCI 20 cutoff. Observers showed high agreement (mean Dice $0.87$), while the model matched human performance in most regions but deviated more in regions 4, 8, and the small-bowel regions (9-12). Across simulations, score differences were typically small (mean $Δ$rPCI $\approx 0.3$-$0.6$) for both observers and the model, and decision flips occurred predominantly when the reference score was near 20. These results suggest that rPCI-derived scoring is generally robust to typical segmentation variability, while highlighting borderline cases as the main setting where expert review remains essential.
Prenatal ultrasound examination is crucial for assessing fetal limb development and detecting congenital anomalies. However, existing artificial intelligence models often overlook fetal lethal skeletal dysplasias due to the lack of high-quality annotated data and a unified framework for multiple long bones. Moreover, generic segmentation models struggle with the inherent noise and semantic gaps in ultrasound images. To address these challenges, we construct the Fetal Limb Bones (FLB) dataset, comprising high-quality annotations for the humerus, femur, tibia-fibula, and radius-ulna. Furthermore, we propose UniFLM, a unified framework for automatic cross-plane segmentation and measurement. UniFLM incorporates a Semantic-Aware Skip Connection module to bridge the semantic gap between encoder and decoder features, and a Positive Sampling strategy to adaptively filter noise and extract essential semantic information. Finally, a Point Regression Mapping module is introduced to learn clinician annotation patterns for precise bone length measurement. Extensive experiments conducted on the FLB dataset demonstrate that the proposed UniFLM achieves superior accuracy and enhanced generalization capabilities in fetal long bone assessment compared to current state-of-the-art models.
Julia Guerrero-Viu, Alex López-Cifuentes, Ignacio Pérez-Villar +1cs.CV
Many Earth Observation applications need land-use/land-cover maps that are both precise and frequently updated, yet the strongest Earth Observation foundation models build their embeddings from a full year of observations. We present a controlled study of the temporal sensitivity of Tessera, one of these leading foundation models, for land-use/land-cover mapping. Keeping the encoder frozen, we recompute its embeddings over varying observation windows, from a full year down to a single day. We use them as inputs to a linear probe and a UNet segmentation head, benchmarking both of them against from-scratch networks on LUCAS, DynamicEarthNet, and PASTIS-R datasets. We show that the value of the embeddings is task-dependent. Where classes are separated by phenology, as for the crop types of PASTIS-R, they reach a mean Intersection-over-Union of $58.3$, about $46\%$ above the best from-scratch model. Where classes are temporally stable (e.g., forests in DynamicEarthNet and LUCAS), embedding-based and from-scratch models match only under full supervision. On both datasets, Tessera embeddings remain markedly more label-efficient. Degradation under shorter temporal windows is gradual and class-dependent. Contracting the window from one year to one month costs $39\%$ of the segmentation accuracy on PASTIS-R but only $5\%$ on DynamicEarthNet. Single-day embeddings still classify land cover in LUCAS at $3.4$ times the chance level. Our study shows that temporal coverage is therefore a tunable cost rather than a fixed prerequisite, opening regimes such as near-real-time mapping and faster land-use/land-cover refresh cycles.
Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in Medical Visual Question Answering (Med-VQA), their reliance on global image features often lacks precise pixel-level grounding, thereby limiting clinical trustworthiness. To bridge the semantic gap between high-level clinical reasoning and spatial localization, we propose \textsc{\textsc{MedREAL}} (\textbf{Med}ical \textbf{RE}asoning-driven \textbf{A}nswering and \textbf{L}ocalization), a unified framework that seamlessly aligns linguistic reasoning with spatial grounding. Specifically, \textsc{MedREAL} introduces \textbf{S}eg \textbf{A}nchored \textbf{R}easoning \textbf{P}ooling (SARP) to distill task-relevant semantic evidence directly from \texttt{[SEG]} tokens within the MLLM's hidden states. Furthermore, a \textbf{R}easoning-to-\textbf{V}isual (R2V) fusion mechanism is proposed to effectively inject these reasoning-aware features into a segmentation pipeline for accurate mask decoding. To facilitate this paradigm, we construct MedRAVS-13K, a comprehensive dataset comprising 13,824 expertly validated samples across four diverse imaging modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textsc{MedREAL} significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts, achieving 68.49\% gIoU and 70.47\% cIoU on benchmark evaluations. By generating evidence masks that are strictly consistent with textual diagnoses, \textsc{MedREAL} provides a robust, interpretable framework for reasoning-driven medical image analysis.
Glass surface detection (GSD) is critical for scene understanding and reconstruction, and yet remains challenging due to the transparency and reflectivity of glass surfaces. Existing GSD methods typically rely on 2D appearance cues, which may fail in geometrically ambiguous scenes. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift: grounding GSD in 3D visual geometry to explicitly model the physical existence of glass surfaces. Our method first distills rich 3D priors from the visual geometry grounded transformer (VGGT) and generates glass-aware 3D representations. It then exploits multi-tasking learning with a novel glass detection head, consisting of two core modules: a Frequency Self-Attention Module (FSAM) that identifies glass-specific spectral features for glass surface localization, and a Geometry Grounding Block (GeGB) that selectively grounds 2D features in 3D geometry for glass surface segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven standard GSD benchmarks, generalizes well to video/multi-modal data, and substantially improves reconstruction in glass scenes. Code is available in https://github.com/YT3DVision/VGGT_GLASS.
Karen Sanchez, Carlos Hinojosa, Albert A. Ávila +5cs.CV
Quantifying wound tissue composition is essential for monitoring chronic ulcer progression and guiding treatment decisions. However, pixel-level annotations are costly, and multi-tissue wound datasets remain scarce, particularly for neglected diseases such as leprosy. We introduce LUTSeg, a longitudinal chronic ulcer dataset comprising 141 images from 39 patients with wound masks and five tissue categories annotated by five expert clinicians, including a multi-expert gold-standard subset for inter-rater agreement analysis. To establish an initial benchmark for LUTSeg, we further propose TiSage, a semi-supervised tissue segmentation framework that integrates multi-scale semantic priors from a frozen medical vision-language model within a teacher-student architecture. We evaluate TiSage on LUTSeg and DFUTissue, showing improvements over supervised and semi-supervised baselines in most low-label settings. Code & data: https://github.com/carlosh93/TiSage
Francesco Vitucci, Michele Lorusso, Francesco Scagliolacs.CL
Markov models are established tools for symbolic music, including non-homogeneous formulations. The narrower contribution examined here is an observation-driven estimation mechanism: overlapping sliding windows derive a trajectory of local transition kernels from one symbolic sequence rather than from an exogenous formal partition. We test this mechanism on 273 logical note events from Debussy's Syrinx (1913), using the often-proposed A-B-A' reading as a reference rather than ground truth. We apply the same validation to absolute-pitch and notated-duration kernels. At $L=6$, both reference boundaries attain the Jensen--Shannon maximum in both dimensions; the duration plateau is substantially narrower (64 of 267 comparisons) than the pitch plateau (210 of 267). Because the theoretical maximum for consecutive sliding-window comparisons is set by window geometry and equals $1/\sqrt{L-1}$ for maximal turnover of the entering/leaving transition, the pitch value at $L=6$ and its broad plateau are not, by themselves, strong evidence. Their cross-dimensional alignment is consistent with boundary sensitivity, while the broad plateaus preclude treating either curve alone as a unique automatic segmenter. Five-hundred-draw re-synthesis experiments quantify departure from the source in both dimensions and expose an exact-copy degeneracy at $L=2$.
Purpose: To quantify how evaluation annotations influence measured pulmonary embolism (PE) segmentation performance relative to model training changes, and to establish a human-referenced framework. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study screened 166 voxel-annotated CT pulmonary angiography cases from CADPE (n=91), FUMPE (n=35), and READ (n=40); 149 were included. A primary rater annotated PE by protocol, and a senior thoracic radiologist reviewed and revised all segmentations. Three additional raters at three centers annotated a 15-case subset. The label effect was measured by evaluating two pretrained nnU-Net models (nnU-Net-A, nnU-Net-B) against original and refined annotations. The model effect was measured by comparing the same architecture trained on different dataset combinations with annotations fixed. The benchmark model (nnPE) was trained with leave-one-dataset-out and pooled five-fold cross-validation. Four metric categories were analyzed with case-paired Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, Benjamini-Hochberg correction, and bootstrap 95% CIs. Results: Changing only the annotation increased mean DSC by 0.143 (0.122-0.166) for nnU-Net-A and 0.188 (0.163-0.213) for nnU-Net-B (both P < .001), whereas changing training-dataset composition changed DSC by 0.028. The label effect exceeded the model effect on CADPE and FUMPE and was 0.045 on READ. Within-mask attenuation SD fell in all three datasets after re-annotation (all P < .001). nnPE reached DSC 0.72 +/- 0.22 on pooled cross-validation but scored below all four annotators across 52 paired comparisons (all corrected P < .05). Conclusion: Evaluation annotations affected measured PE segmentation performance at least as much as model training choices. A human-referenced evaluation framework is publicly available for future study.
Dexter Wen Jie Teo, Nairouz Shehata, Herve Lombaerteess.IV cs.CV cs.LG
Cardiac cine-MRI serves as a direct visual indicator of cardiovascular hemodynamics by capturing the continuous wall motion of the aorta. Quantifying these dynamic structural changes across the cardiac cycle is essential for measuring aortic distensibility, a primary marker of arterial stiffness. However, standard 2D segmentation networks focus on each frame independently. Consequently, when rapid systolic flow temporarily obscures the aorta's boundaries, this lack of continuous context results in frame-to-frame tracking dropouts and boundary inconsistencies. Spatiotemporal ($2\text{D}+t$) networks can enforce temporal consistency across the sequence but suffer from a scarcity of expert annotations. To address this, we present a semi-supervised spatiotemporal ($2\text{D}$ to $2\text{D}+t$) knowledge distillation framework exploiting the cardiac cycle. The framework distills a spatial teacher's expertise into a spatiotemporal student network by executing a dynamic latent interception, pairing a recurrent spatiotemporal bottleneck with a residual spatial bypass. Our model selection strategy applies a baseline validation threshold ($\text{DSC} \ge 0.50$) prior to selecting the epoch that maximizes anatomical consistency. This strategy enables the spatiotemporal student model to achieve superior surface tracking accuracy ($\text{NSD@1mm} = 92.3\% \pm 0.2\%$) and high structural reliability ($\text{Frac}_{2\text{CC}} = 99.2\% \pm 0.6\%$), reducing population-wide structural anomalies by over 56\% compared to a 2D nnU-Net baseline.
Clea Dronne, Catharine H Clark, Xavier Loizeau +3cs.CV
Accurate organ-at-risk segmentation is essential for radiotherapy planning, but reviewing segmentations is time-consuming and subjective. We investigate normative modelling for segmentation error detection in head-and-neck CT, comparing a VAE framework with an image-conditioned segmentation diffusion model. Models were evaluated on RADCURE brainstem and spinal cord segmentations using simulated boundary and width perturbations. Error detection was assessed using the Dice similarity coefficient and the Distance to Agreement (DTA) between the input and reconstructed segmentations. While both models detected some simulated errors, regional DTA showed that the diffusion model localised subtle boundary errors more consistently. These results support image-conditioned diffusion reconstruction as a promising framework for localised, anatomy-aware segmentation QA.
Taqi Hamoda, Hayat Rajani, Nuno Graciascs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Automated perception in side-scan sonar (SSS) imagery is severely hindered by physical acoustic artifacts, resulting in representations that inextricably mix intrinsic seabed reflectivity with transient viewing geometries. Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks rely on augmentations designed for natural images, failing to account for acoustic degradation and explicitly enforce view-invariance. To address this gap, we introduce a physics-informed self-distillation framework built upon the DINOv3 architecture utilizing a ConvNeXt-v2-Tiny backbone to maximize data efficiency. The proposed methodology enforces view-invariance through two primary mechanisms: physically motivated augmentations that simulate speckle noise, range-dependent attenuation, and radiometric miscalibration; and a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) penalty that explicitly decouples learned dense patch features from physical viewing parameters. Furthermore, we propose a dense, hierarchical feature fusion strategy across all four network stages to preserve fine-grained sediment details alongside deep semantic abstractions. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that the framework natively groups complex benthic topographies into stable, noise-free semantic clusters without relying on manual annotations. During supervised downstream tasks on the S3Seg dataset, the fused representations exhibited exceptional data efficiency, achieving 96% of its absolute peak performance using only 10% of the available annotated data, ultimately reaching a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 71.4% and an overall accuracy of 86.5%.
AI-generated image manipulation localization identifies edited pixels, but its OOD performance lags behind image-level detection partly because pixel supervision entangles forensic evidence with dataset-specific mask geometry and semantic boundaries. Extending image-level distribution alignment to localization, we construct COCO-ControlNet with source-image Canny edges and depth maps to align semantics and geometry, improving OOD performance across multiple localizers. Yet tighter Mask-VAE Reconstruction Alignment (Mask-VAE) underperforms COCO-ControlNet, showing that VAE reconstruction artifacts transfer poorly to local diffusion-inpainting artifacts. We also identify \emph{boundary adhesion}, where fine-tuned segmentation models snap predictions to semantic object contours rather than true manipulation boundaries. These findings motivate GAP-SAM, which encodes an image and its frozen VAE reconstruction into a global artifact token and injects it into SAM3's feature pyramid via zero-gated FiLM before pixel decoding. Without prescribing a spatial region, this token modulates dense decoding to preserve localization while suppressing semantic-boundary shortcuts. Across six datasets, GAP-SAM averages 79.8 Pixel-F1, outperforming the strongest prior method by 12.6 points. It also performs best at every tested severity of JPEG compression, Gaussian blur, and resizing.
Conventional convolutional kernels are typically defined on fixed discrete grids, limiting their ability to accommodate heterogeneous local structures. Existing adaptive operators improve flexibility but often couple geometric scale variation with content-dependent filtering, while incurring high computational cost from per-location kernel generation. To decouple geometric scale adaptation from content-dependent filtering while avoiding expensive per-location kernel generation, we propose Continuous Relative-scale KAN (Core-KAN), a relative-scale-conditioned continuous convolution operator. Core-KAN maps input features into a compact latent basis space and uses a lightweight scale controller to predict local scales relative to an exponential moving average reference. A KAN-based generator represents depth-wise kernel bases as continuous coordinate functions, allowing the operator to synthesize spatial filters at arbitrary resolutions rather than being confined to a fixed lattice. Instead of synthesizing independent kernels at every location, it constructs a compact bank of scale-conditioned kernel responses and interpolates them according to the predicted local scale map. An independent mixing controller further combines the interpolated basis responses based on local content, explicitly decoupling geometric scale adaptation from content-dependent filtering. Together with lightweight pointwise projections, this design forms a low-rank dynamic convolution that scales efficiently with kernel size and integrates readily into hierarchical vision backbones. Experiments across three representative vision tasks show Core-KAN consistently outperforms strong convolutional and dynamic-kernel baselines with only marginal parameter and computational overhead, offering an efficient, general framework for continuous, scale-adaptive convolution.
Estimating interpretable conditional-dependence structures from multimodal visual-linguistic features remains largely unexplored. We propose CM-GLasso (Cross-Modal Graphical Lasso), a framework that bridges vision-language representation learning and sparse Gaussian Graphical Models. CM-GLasso introduces three key components: (i) a text visualization strategy that renders class-attribute descriptions as images and processes them through the same SigLIP-2 vision encoder as natural images, yielding prototype-indexed patch-level attention footprints in a shared feature coordinate system; (ii) a cross-attention distillation mechanism that condenses high-dimensional patches into a small set of semantic graph nodes, whose attention-footprint similarities yield cross-modal structural priors for non-uniform L1 penalization; (iii) a joint ADMM formulation that estimates shared and class-specific precision components within a single convex objective, avoiding the need to first estimate and then decompose separate class-wise graphs. The learned sparse graph topologies directly support a parameter-free, precision-based classification rule and a lightweight topology-aware segmentation head. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate that CM-GLasso achieves competitive or superior performance compared with strong feature-based and task-specific baselines. Under the matched controlled protocol, it attains the highest average classification accuracy (91.97%) and the highest segmentation mIoU among the controlled baselines on VOC (74.75%) and ADE20K (64.01%), while also yielding explicit sparse conditional-dependence graphs with common-specific decomposition.
Automated recognition of ancient cuneiform script poses a compound signal-degradation problem: the three-dimensional relief of clay tablets creates spatially varying illumination and cast shadows, surface erosion introduces structured noise that overlaps with genuine sign impressions, and severe class imbalance across 141 sign categories undermines classifier reliability. We introduce EpigraphNet, a segmentation-guided transformer pipeline evaluated on the Persepolis Fortification Archive. From 1,239 annotated tablet images, brightness-adaptive morphological preprocessing and zero-shot SAM2-Large segmentation generate clean binary symbol masks, which a fine-tuned Vision Transformer (ViT-B/16) with inverse-frequency class weighting then classifies. EpigraphNet reaches 86.41% top-1 accuracy on a 132-class benchmark, a 17.21 percentage-point gain over the strongest CNN baseline (ResNet-101, 69.20%) and 5.31-12.91% over four modern backbones (DeiT-B/16, Swin-B, ConvNeXt-B, EfficientNet-B4) under identical conditions. The full pipeline runs at approximately 18 ms per sign on an NVIDIA A100 GPU. A lower Spearman correlation between sign frequency and per-class performance indicates more balanced recognition across frequent and rare classes. Implementation is available at: github.com/r11up/sam-guided-vit
Alexandre G. Leclercq, Noémie N. Moreau, Hugo Audebert +21cs.CV
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive primary brain tumor in adults, with a median overall survival of 15 months. Longitudinal, multi-modal imaging datasets with comprehensive clinical and treatment data are essential to support the development of reproducible computational methods for treatment response prediction, disease progression modelling, and personalized medicine. We present CFB-GBM v2.0, an extension of our previously released CFB-GBM dataset comprising 264 GBM patients treated according to the standard Stupp protocol. The primary contribution of this release is the completion of Gross Tumour Volume (GTV) delineations across all available timepoints ($t_0$, $t_1$ and $t_2$), increasing the overall GTV completion rate from 35% to 97%. This was achieved using a nnU-Net model pre-trained on BraTS 2021 and fine-tuned on CFB-GBM ground-truth contours, with the generated segmentations validated by five radiation oncologists. From these longitudinal GTV annotations, volumetric RANO 2.0 response category labels were derived for all available temporality pairs ($t_0 \rightarrow t_1$, $t_0 \rightarrow t_2$ and $t_1 \rightarrow t_2$). To further ease dataset usability and reproducibility, brain masks computed with HD-BET and pre-computed radiomic features extracted with PyRadiomics are provided for each patient timepoint and MRI modality. Additionally, the WHO classification guideline (2016 vs. 2021) applicable to each patient's diagnosis is now explicitly documented. CFB-GBM v2.0 is publicly available on The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) at https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/collection/cfb-gbm .
Kooshan Amini, Jamie Ellen Padgett, Guha Balakrishnancs.CV eess.IV
Hurricane debris removal is planned, contracted, and federally reimbursed on the basis of volume estimates, yet operational practice still relies on parametric forecasts with 41-90% documented over-estimation or on truck-load tallies that arrive only after hauling begins. We present DebrisHeightNet, a segmentation-conditioned monocular debris-height network that estimates spatially explicit debris volume from a single pass of post-event aerial RGB imagery, the kind of survey routinely flown within days of a hurricane landfall. We train only a lightweight 1.08 M-parameter head on top of two frozen vision foundation models. This head regresses height from a Depth Anything V2 backbone, conditioned on the debris segmentation of CLIPSeg-debris from our prior work. Because no post-hurricane debris-height ground truth exists, we synthesize the training target by confidence-weighted LiDAR-monocular fusion (CW-LMF), designed to suppress non-debris LiDAR returns. This fused target is a constructed supervision signal rather than ground truth, so we corroborate it against external references rather than claiming it as truth. A region-level power-law calibration, driven by each region's low-density debris fraction, converts model volume into an estimate of the reported hauled debris with quantified uncertainty. Across ten regions spanning five hurricanes and three states, the uncalibrated model agrees with an independent uncrewed-aerial-vehicle (UAV) survey of the training region at Spearman $ρ= 0.87$ and lands within 30% of the reported record where the Hazus and FEMA-hybrid parametric forecasts over-predict it by 2.7-4.8$\times$. Deployment requires no LiDAR, no ground access, and no second flight, so the method can produce spatially explicit volume estimates wherever single-pass post-event imagery is flown.
Hadi Hasan, Safaa Salman, Lama Sleem +2cs.CV cs.AI
Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, while histopathological diagnosis is often affected by inter-observer variability and the substantial workload associated with manual slide examination. Although deep learning has shown considerable potential in computational pathology, comprehensive benchmarks that integrate tissue classification and region segmentation within a unified analytical framework remain limited. This study presents a two-stage deep learning framework for multi-class tissue classification and pixel-level histopathological region segmentation, accompanied by a systematic comparison of state-of-the-art architectures at each stage. For tissue classification, six models, a custom convolutional neural network, VGG16, DenseNet, MobileNetV3, a custom Vision Transformer, and YOLO11, are evaluated on a combined dataset of 39,000 images derived from LC25000 and LungHist700. The models distinguish between adenocarcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and normal lung tissue. YOLO11 achieves the best classification performance, with an accuracy of 98.38%, a five-fold cross-validation accuracy of 98.21 +/- 0.35%, and a macro F1-score of 0.98. For region segmentation, U-Net, ResNet-encoder U-Net, DeepLabV3+, and YOLO11-seg are evaluated using the GlaS gland segmentation benchmark. DeepLabV3+ obtains the highest Intersection over Union of 0.80 and a Dice score of 0.89, while YOLO11-seg achieves a comparable Intersection over Union of 0.79 using approximately 14x fewer parameters. The best-performing classification and segmentation models are subsequently integrated into an end-to-end framework, providing an accurate, computationally efficient, and reproducible baseline for automated histopathological image analysis.
Michael Chertok, Alon Tiosano, Orly Gal-Or +4cs.LG
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) images retinal blood flow, giving capillary-perfusion and foveal-avascular-zone biomarkers that grade diabetic-retinopathy ischemia. Because OCTA hardware is less common than structural OCT, recent work synthesizes it from OCT, reporting strong reconstruction (3D PSNR > 31 dB, SSIM > 0.9). We ask not whether the synthetic image looks similar, but whether it supports the measurements OCTA is acquired for. A frozen real-OCTA segmenter, applied as a probe to two synthesizers (XOCT, TransPro), shows downstream Dice falling with structural fineness: large vessels survive (0.862 -> 0.831) while the fine capillary network collapses (0.798 -> 0.635, five times the large-vessel loss; paired Wilcoxon p < 1e-3), TransPro worse throughout. A matched-blur control shows this detail is fabricated, not blurred. Retrained on a private Spectralis dataset, neither synthesizer reproduces the neovascular lesion (qualitative, n=3). Reconstruction fidelity is not clinical utility; we establish downstream-task fidelity as the evaluation OCT-to-OCTA synthesis needs.
Foundation segmentation models excel at generating high-quality, class-agnostic masks, but they struggle to associate these proposals with specific target objects. This semantic gap severely hinders their deployment in downstream applications like robotic manipulation, which demand precise unseen objects segmentation. Existing approaches attempt to resolve this by relying on exhaustive 3D object model priors, inherently introducing prohibitive computational overhead and complex, multi-stage pipelines. To address these limitations, we propose SOS (Streamlined Object-conditional Transformer for model-free Segmentation). SOS completely eliminates the reliance on 3D models, requiring only a single reference image per target object. Central to our framework is a novel Object-Conditional Transformer that learns identity-anchored queries, unifying mask generation and target identification into a single feed-forward pass. This streamlined design drastically improves both structural and computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SOS establishes a new state-of-the-art for model-free unseen objects segmentation, delivering accurate and high-efficiency performance. The project page and code are available at https://sos-seg.github.io/.
Computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) offer new tools for cultural heritage (CH) artifact analysis, but the CV/ML pipeline remains largely inaccessible to CH domain experts, who lack the background to configure, train, or assess models. We present AmalthAI, an open-source CV platform that bridges this gap, enabling non-ML CH experts to independently produce and validate archaeologically meaningful findings. The interface covers dataset management, training, and inference for classification, segmentation, and object detection, with Kubeflow and Katib handling scalable training and hyperparameter search. Grad-CAM localizes the image region behind a prediction, and a vision-language model (VLM) adds a text description of it for expert review. Since archaeological data is often state-owned or rights-encumbered and cannot leave institutional custody, AmalthAI's self-hostable deployment ensures sensitive data is kept within premises. We test the platform on an archaeological use case built on a custom dataset of clay textile imprints, where CH experts trained and validated segmentation, and classification models for hypothesis testing. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/TEXTaiLES/AmalthAI.
Haifan Gong, Shiyu Chen, Bodong Wang +11cs.AI cs.CV
Thyroid ultrasound diagnosis requires coordinated lesion localization, measurement, risk stratification and reporting, yet most AI systems address these tasks in isolation and provide limited support for clinical review. We present ThyroidXAgent, a clinician-interactive agentic AI system that coordinates specialized diagnostic tools and stores their outputs as an auditable case-level evidence record. The system was developed using OpenThyroidDB, a multicentre, multitask resource integrating approximately 0.3 million ultrasound images and 24,000 paired reports, and was evaluated on 28,458 non-overlapping test cases, including 8,721 cases from 35 centres in the private NHC-MISD-TUS cohort. Across heterogeneous datasets, ThyroidXAgent achieved a mean Dice score of 87.21 percent for nodule segmentation and a mean AUROC of 0.9466 for benign-malignant classification. The same workflow supported lymph-node metastasis prediction and follicular versus papillary thyroid carcinoma classification, with AUROCs of 0.864 and 0.805, respectively. For report generation, evidence-grounded assembly outperformed multimodal language-model baselines across three cohorts. ThyClinScore, a lesion-level clinical semantic metric introduced here, showed the strongest correlation with a location-aware language-model judge. ThyroidXAgent improved physician classification accuracy, increased report diagnostic consistency from 70.3 percent to 86.2 percent, and reduced segmentation and reporting time by 35.9 percent and 27.4 percent, respectively. These findings support auditable, clinician-correctable agentic AI for thyroid ultrasound diagnosis and reporting.