arXiv:2511.13527cs.LG2025-11中稿 · EurIPS 2025 Worksh…

针对高分辨率影像中肿瘤检测的局部分类,提出缓解伪相关性的方法。

Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Patch-wise Tumor Classification on High-Resolution Multimodal Images

  • 通过调整分组最大最差准确率,优化模型对伪相关特征的鲁棒性
  • 在两种阈值下,最差组准确率提升约7%,显著改善少数关键样本表现
  • 适合关注小组织肿瘤或大背景非肿瘤等边界案例的医学影像研究者

基于局部区域的多标签分类为高分辨率图像提供了一种高效替代方案,尤其适用于判断某局部区域内是否存在目标对象(如肿瘤)而非精确划定空间范围。该方法大幅降低标注成本,简化训练流程,并支持灵活调整局部块大小以匹配决策粒度需求。本文聚焦于高分辨率多模态非线性显微图像中单类肿瘤的局部二值分类任务。我们发现,尽管此简化范式利于模型开发,但会引入局部块组成与标签之间的伪相关:含肿瘤的局部块通常包含更大组织区域,而无肿瘤的局部块则多为背景且组织面积小。进一步量化了此类伪相关导致的预测偏差,并提出采用可适配最大化最差组准确率(WGA)的GERNE去偏方法进行缓解。实验表明,在两个不同阈值下,相较标准经验风险最小化(ERM),WGA提升约7%。该改进有效增强了模型在关键少数情况下的性能,如组织面积小的肿瘤局部块或组织面积大的非肿瘤局部块,凸显了在局部分类任务中考虑伪相关的重要性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Patch-wise multi-label classification provides an efficient alternative to full pixel-wise segmentation on high-resolution images, particularly when the objective is to determine the presence or absence of target objects within a patch rather than their precise spatial extent. This formulation substantially reduces annotation cost, simplifies training, and allows flexible patch sizing aligned with the desired level of decision granularity. In this work, we focus on a special case, patch-wise binary classification, applied to the detection of a single class of interest (tumor) on high-resolution multimodal nonlinear microscopy images. We show that, although this simplified formulation enables efficient model development, it can introduce spurious correlations between patch composition and labels: tumor patches tend to contain larger tissue regions, whereas non-tumor patches often consist mostly of background with small tissue areas. We further quantify the bias in model predictions caused by this spurious correlation, and propose to use a debiasing strategy to mitigate its effect. Specifically, we apply GERNE, a debiasing method that can be adapted to maximize worst-group accuracy (WGA). Our results show an improvement in WGA by approximately 7% compared to ERM for two different thresholds used to binarize the spurious feature. This enhancement boosts model performance on critical minority cases, such as tumor patches with small tissues and non-tumor patches with large tissues, and underscores the importance of spurious correlation-aware learning in patch-wise classification problems.

医学影像伪相关分类优化

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