#01Oct 16, 2026
cs.CV
Beyond Multi-Stage Pipelines: A Label-Correlation Ensemble for Multi-Label Retinal Fundus Disease Classification
Md Asif Uddin, Jannatul Ferdous, Asif Islam and 5 more
Retinal fundus images frequently carry more than one disease, and public fundus datasets are heterogeneous and severely long-tailed. Clinical triage suggests a staged design, in which a screening gate, a disease-group router and group-specific classifiers operate in sequence, but it is unclear whether this hierarchy earns its complexity. We present a controlled comparison of three architectures on a unified 39-target label space built from RFMiD 1.0, RFMiD 2.0 and ODIR-5K (12,652 images): (i) a three-stage gated cascade of eight models, (ii) a flat model with 39 independent sigmoid outputs, and (iii) a label-correlation model that replaces the flat linear head with 39 learned label queries and a two-layer transformer decoder. All three share one Swin-V2-B backbone, one preprocessing pipeline and one training protocol, so differences are attributable to the architecture. Staging offers no consistent advantage: tracing every missed disease instance to the stage that lost it shows that the two coarse gates discard 34.2% of true instances while the fine-grained classifiers lose only 6.7%, and the gates' hard zeros depress the cascade's macro-AUC to 0.747. Label-correlation modeling gives the largest single gain, raising the detection rate from 0.621 to 0.682 (0.689 with test-time augmentation). Blending the flat and label-correlation models under four-view test-time augmentation is the best configuration on six of eight metrics (exact match 0.694, micro-F1 0.678, macro-F1 0.456, macro-AUC 0.972). On definition-matched class subsets it matches or exceeds four recent studies on macro- and micro-F1, most clearly on low-support pathologies. We also show that ensembling a gated cascade with continuous-output models is harmful, and that per-source negative sampling is needed to remove a dataset shortcut that otherwise yields a spurious AUC of 1.000.
#02Oct 16, 2026
cs.CV
Diversity Without Labels: Task-Agnostic Coreset Selection Across Perception and Action
Julia Hindel, Benjamin Ramtoula, Kyuhwan Yeon and 4 more
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.
#03Oct 16, 2026
cs.CV
PanoBench: A Panoptic Occupancy Prediction Benchmark for Autonomous Driving
Yi Feng, Zizhan Guo, Junwu E and 8 more
Panoptic occupancy unifies 3D geometry, semantics, and instance identities, but its development is limited by scarce instance-aware annotations. Existing benchmarks mainly provide semantic labels reconstructed from incomplete sensor observations, while panoptic datasets have limited domain coverage or annotation completeness. We introduce PanoBench, a camera-centric panoptic occupancy prediction benchmark spanning synthetic and real-world driving scenes. It combines PanoBench-CarlaOcc, PanoBench-nuScenes, and PanoBench-KITTI360 through canonical data interfaces and unified evaluation protocols, providing multi-resolution annotations with persistent instance identities. The synthetic branch derives complete panoptic geometry from simulated meshes. For real-world data, a new pipeline reconstructs backgrounds using geometric priors and topology constraints, generates foreground mesh assets from multi-frame multi-view images, and fuses them into sparse panoptic voxels. A unified valid-mask protocol evaluates complete thing instances supported by temporal observations while scoring stuff regions at the voxel level. Analyses of observation fidelity, geometric completeness, spatial continuity, and temporal consistency demonstrate the benefits of the resulting annotations over existing occupancy benchmarks. We benchmark representative methods on semantic occupancy prediction, panoptic occupancy prediction, and 4D occupancy forecasting, and study voxel resolution, synthetic-to-real transfer, and storage efficiency. These results reveal complementary strengths of volumetric and ray-based metrics and persistent challenges in real-world instance-aware prediction. PanoBench is available at https://mias.group/PanoBench.
#04Oct 16, 2026
cs.CV
SemPurify: Semantics-Aware Data Purification for Black-box Backdoor Defense
Jiawei Yu, Syed Irfan Ali Meerza, Yi Wu and 2 more
Backdoor attacks have emerged as a critical security threat in machine learning, where adversaries embed triggers within poisoned training samples to manipulate a model's predictions on targeted inputs while leaving its general behavior unaffected. This stealthy nature makes backdoor attacks difficult to detect, as the model functions normally until activated by a specific malicious trigger. Current purification-based defenses use image transformations (e.g., blurring) to disrupt trigger patterns but often degrade image quality. Even with advanced restoration techniques like diffusion models, these approaches can still alter visual or semantic information, reducing utility for downstream tasks. To address this, we propose the first semantics-aware data purification framework for black-box backdoor defense, SemPurify, which explicitly incorporates multi-level semantics (i.e., low-level semantic embeddings and high-level image tags) within a text-to-image (T2I) framework to guide image restoration during purification. Using this semantic information, the T2I model subsequently refines the transformed samples, helping preserve visual details and semantic information during restoration. Extensive experiments spanning multiple backdoor scenarios, i.e., classification models, CLIP-style encoders, and generative models, demonstrate that SemPurify reliably removes backdoors while effectively preserving semantic information for downstream tasks.
#05Oct 16, 2026
cs.CV
PCDFusion: Proposal-Context-Detail Bayesian Rendering for Infrared-Visible Image Fusion
Rui Liu, Lin Gu, Hesong Li and 1 more
Infrared-visible image fusion (IVIF) aims to combine visible and thermal infrared observations for human perception and downstream vision tasks. Visible and thermal infrared observations are physically complementary but unreliable in different ways. Existing deep IVIF methods mainly improve feature interaction and reconstruction, but often lack an explicit local rule for deciding when visible appearance should dominate and when thermal responses should contribute. To address this issue, we reformulate IVIF as local Bayesian posterior rendering, where fusion is controlled by posterior action weights rather than direct modality mixing. In this paper, we propose Proposal-Context-Detail Fusion (PCDFusion), a visible-anchored framework that implements this formulation through three rendering stages. PCDFusion preserves potentially useful thermal responses, updates exposure-degraded visible regions, and renders reliable band-limited infrared structures into the final luminance. Extensive experiments on public IVIF benchmarks show that PCDFusion improves fusion quality, target recovery, and downstream detection and segmentation performance under challenging illumination. The code is available at https://github.com/BIT-RuiLiu/PCDFusion.git.