通过注意力机制动态学习病理分割中各类别难度,提升分割精度。
Learning Class Difficulty via Dynamic Focal Attention for Histopathology Segmentation

- 在查询式掩码解码器中引入可学习类别偏置,直接建模类别难度
- 在三个数据集上提升Dice和IoU,优于传统重加权方法
- 无需额外训练阶段,适合医学图像分割场景
基于频率的损失重加权是解决病理图像分割不平衡问题的标准方法,但其隐含假设是稀有类别更难。然而,难度还来自形态变异、边界模糊和上下文相似性,这些与类别频率基本无关。本文提出动态焦点注意力(DFA),一种简单高效的机制,可在基于查询的掩码解码器的交叉注意力中直接学习类别特定难度。DFA在注意力logits中添加可学习的类别偏置,于预测前重加权表示,而非在梯度后重加权。初始值基于中心化对数频率先验,防止梯度饥饿,并端到端优化,使偏置在训练过程中适应难度信号。在三个基准数据集(BCSS、BDSA、CRAG)上,DFA持续提升Dice和IoU,达到或超过两阶段难度感知基线,且无需独立估计器或额外训练阶段。结果表明,在表示层面编码难度是传统损失重加权的合理替代方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Frequency-based loss reweighting, the standard remedy for imbalanced histopathology segmentation, implicitly assumes that rare classes are difficult. Yet difficulty also arises from morphological variability, boundary ambiguity, and contextual similarity, all largely orthogonal to class frequency. We propose Dynamic Focal Attention (DFA), a simple, efficient mechanism that learns class-specific difficulty directly within the cross-attention of query-based mask decoders. DFA adds a learnable per-class bias to the attention logits, reweighting representations before prediction rather than gradients after it. Initialised from a centred log-frequency prior to prevent gradient starvation and then optimised end-to-end, the bias adapts to difficulty signals as they emerge during training, unifying frequency- and difficulty-aware reweighting in a single attention-bias framework. On three benchmarks (BCSS, BDSA, CRAG), DFA consistently improves Dice and IoU, matching or exceeding a two-stage difficulty-aware baseline without a separate estimator or extra training stage. This shows that encoding difficulty at the representation level is a principled alternative to conventional loss reweighting.
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