改进分割不确定性的空间聚合方法,提升下游任务表现。
Better than Average: Spatially-Aware Aggregation of Segmentation Uncertainty Improves Downstream Performance
- 提出融合空间结构的新型聚合策略,优于传统全局平均。
- 在10个数据集上验证,空间感知聚合显著提升异常检测效果。
- 设计元聚合器,适配不同数据特征,鲁棒性强。
不确定性量化(UQ)对生物医学图像分析或自动驾驶等安全关键领域中自动化图像分割的可靠性至关重要。分割任务生成像素级不确定性得分,需聚合为图像级分数以支持下游任务如分布外(OoD)检测或故障识别。尽管聚合策略被普遍使用,其特性及对下游性能的影响尚未系统研究。全局平均是默认方法,但未考虑不确定性空间与结构特征。现有替代方案如块、类别和阈值基策略缺乏系统比较,导致报告不一致且无明确最佳实践。本文通过(1)形式化分析常见策略的性质、局限与陷阱;(2)提出融入空间不确定性结构的新策略;(3)在十种涵盖不同图像几何与结构的数据集上基准测试其在OoD和故障检测中的表现。结果表明,利用空间结构的聚合器在两类下游任务中均表现更优。然而,各聚合器性能高度依赖数据集特性,因此(4)提出一种元聚合器,集成多个聚合器,在多种数据集上保持稳健表现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is crucial for ensuring the reliability of automated image segmentations in safety-critical domains like biomedical image analysis or autonomous driving. In segmentation, UQ generates pixel-wise uncertainty scores that must be aggregated into image-level scores for downstream tasks like Out-of-Distribution (OoD) or failure detection. Despite routine use of aggregation strategies, their properties and impact on downstream task performance have not yet been comprehensively studied. Global Average is the default choice, yet it does not account for spatial and structural features of segmentation uncertainty. Alternatives like patch-, class- and threshold-based strategies exist, but lack systematic comparison, leading to inconsistent reporting and unclear best practices. We address this gap by (1) formally analyzing properties, limitations, and pitfalls of common strategies; (2) proposing novel strategies that incorporate spatial uncertainty structure and (3) benchmarking their performance on OoD and failure detection across ten datasets that vary in image geometry and structure. We find that aggregators leveraging spatial structure yield stronger performance in both downstream tasks studied. However, the performance of individual aggregators depends heavily on dataset characteristics, so we (4) propose a meta-aggregator that integrates multiple aggregators and performs robustly across datasets.
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