#01Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
AutoMIL: Automated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole-Slide Image Classification
Jonas Waibel, Frank Kramer, Dominik Müller
Developing multiple instance learning pipelines for the classification of whole-slide images involves many interdependent design decisions and expertise in both pathology and machine learning. We present AutoMIL, an open-source framework that applies principles from the field of automated machine learning to tackle this task by automating integral pipeline steps, such as preprocessing, training and evaluation. In a benchmark evaluation with default settings, AutoMIL reached ROC-AUC scores of 0.94 on UBC-OCEAN, 0.99 on PCam and 0.93-0.96 on a TCGA-NSCLC subset, comparable to specialised pipelines in related work. Ensembling mainly improved performance on imbalanced data, showing that an automated pipeline must adapt to dataset characteristics. AutoMIL thus provides an accessible baseline for whole-slide image classification without manual pipeline configuration.
#02Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
An Error Budget for Shuffled Multimodal Windows in the 3rd WEAR Challenge: Stacking, Count Constraints and Seam Matching
Soheil Kooklan
The 3rd WEAR Dataset Challenge asks for an activity label for every one-second window of four unseen participants. Each window has 15 VideoMAEv2 frame embeddings, the accelerometer signal of one random limb, and the windows are shuffled. This report is an empirical analysis of one system built after the challenge deadline. Window classifiers are stacked with features averaged over per-participant graphs of video neighbours and scored successor candidates, and a mean-field style decoder with a soft count constraint per activity labels all windows of a participant together. The setting is offline and transductive, and the count constraint relies on each activity being performed once. In a participant-wise simulation with participant-level bootstrap intervals, stacking added 0.051 macro F1 over stage-1 fusion and the count constraint 0.011 (95% interval 0.006 to 0.017). A quadratic seam distance ranks the true same-limb successor first among about 720 candidates in 83.9% of cases, but adding it to the link model changed macro F1 by -0.0001 (-0.0006 to 0.0005). With the decoder settings and the mixing weight chosen inside the folds and the mislabelled spans left out of training, the system scores 0.936 in simulation (0.940 for participants who performed each activity once); the submitted configuration scores 0.938 (0.943). Per-participant scores range from 0.80 to 0.97. These results come from a non-nested stacking protocol that uses unlabelled features transductively, so they are not a fully inductive estimate. An oracle that averages the final unary scores over the true segments reaches 0.973, and 79% of the remaining errors involve the null class. On the private leaderboard, which no choice used, the selected Kaggle submission scored 0.9231 (public 0.9254, with bounds partly tuned there), and a later one with bounds chosen in simulation scored 0.9247 (public 0.9253).
#03Oct 23, 2026
cs.LG
Online Continual Learning in Edge-Cloud Applications
Charalampos Davalas, Dimitrios Michail, Christos Diou and 2 more
Deployed machine learning models in real-world IoT and edge/cloud systems face a critical reliability bottleneck: the requirement for online adaptation to non-stationary data streams while operating without access to the full original training dataset. Performance is severely degraded when models encounter Out-of-Distribution (OOD) inputs or suffer from catastrophic forgetting. Addressing these challenges requires adaptation mechanisms capable of learning from evolving data streams while preserving previously acquired knowledge. This paper proposes an edge-cloud methodology for integrating Continual Learning (CL) with Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detection and Concept Drift Detection in IoT applications. The methodology incorporates ODIN and ECDD as alternative mechanisms for identifying informative samples for annotation and triggering rehearsal-based model updates. Experimental results across automotive, healthcare, and agricultural datasets demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology and its potential to support model adaptation while mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
#04Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
PROVE: Probabilistic Visual Grounding via Patch-Level Evidence for Vision-Language Models
Mayank Nautiyal, Tianru Zhang, Li Ju and 2 more
Visual grounding with vision-language models such as CLIP typically produces a single deterministic relevance map for an image-query pair, without indicating whether the localisation is reliable or whether the referent is present at all. We introduce \textbf{PROVE} (\textbf{Pro}babilistic \textbf{V}isual Grounding via Patch-Level \textbf{E}vidence), a post-hoc evidential adapter that maps frozen CLIP patch features to per-patch Beta distributions without modifying the backbone. PROVE casts grounding as per-patch membership: each patch accumulates positive and negative evidence for whether it belongs to the referent, so a query may match zero, one, or many patches. We train PROVE with an evidential objective on soft patch-coverage targets, and define a prior-pull objective that keeps absent-referent examples near an uninformative prior, so that vacuity serves as an absence signal without a dedicated presence classifier. During inference, a single forward pass yields, in closed form, a posterior-mean grounding map, a spatial vacuity map, and an image-level absence score. We evaluate PROVE on referring-expression benchmarks: it is competitive in localisation with state-of-the-art CLIP grounding methods, its uncertainty tracks localisation error and supports selective prediction under abstention, and its image-level score detects when the referent is absent altogether. Our evidential patch-membership modelling offers a simple, drop-in mechanism for probabilistic verification in frozen vision-language grounding systems.
#05Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
Learning Fine-Grained Visual Classification with Text as Privileged Information via Multimodal Distillation
Aishwarya Venkataramanan, Christian Ickler, Joachim Denzler
Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) requires distinguishing between highly similar categories by focusing on subtle, localized visual differences. Recent multimodal methods have demonstrated that textual attribute descriptions can provide valuable semantic supervision by explicitly describing discriminative object characteristics. However, these descriptions are typically unavailable at test time, limiting their direct use in deployment. We propose FG-LUPI, a Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI)-based framework that leverages attribute descriptions during training. We train a multimodal teacher that integrates image patches and textual attributes via gated cross-attention, allowing semantic attributes to condition visual representations. We distill this knowledge into an image-only student using multi-level distillation at the prediction, patch, and attention levels, aligning global predictions, patch representations, and attention patterns with the teacher. This encourages the student to inherit attention structure learned from multimodal supervision while maintaining image-only inference. Experiments on multiple FGVC benchmarks show consistent improvements in classification accuracy over strong ViT-based baselines. Furthermore, evaluation using Expected Calibration Error (ECE) shows that FG-LUPI also produces better-calibrated predictions across all six benchmarks. These results suggest that textual attribute supervision can benefit not only fine-grained recognition performance but also the reliability of model confidence, while preserving the efficiency and practicality of image-only inference.