长时自监督预训练能提升眼底病筛查模型的可信度,让模型学会主动放弃不确定判断。
Knowing When Not to Predict: Self Supervised Learning and Abstention for Safer DR Screening

- 通过延长自监督预训练时间,提升模型对不确定预测的识别能力
- 预训练越长,模型在关键指标上表现越好,但超过某点后收益不再明显
- 适合关注医疗模型可靠性、需自动拒判高风险案例的研究者
自监督学习(SSL)已成为医学图像模型预训练的标准方法,但其性能通常仅以下游准确率衡量。对于糖尿病视网膜病变分级这类安全敏感的筛查任务,仅准确率不足:模型还必须识别自身预测不可靠的情况,并将不确定病例转交临床审查。本文研究了不同长度的SSL预训练对校准置信度及基于置信度的拒判行为的影响。在固定微调协议下评估多个SSL检查点,分析校准置信度、覆盖率、选择性准确率和选择性宏F1。在多个数据集和数据条件下,相比从零开始训练,较长的SSL预训练显著提升了选择性预测性能。与以往主要关注下游准确率或AUROC的研究不同,本工作揭示了预训练时长对置信度行为的影响。值得注意的是,当准确率趋于饱和后,选择性表现仍随检查点变化显著,且更长的预训练并不总是带来更高的可靠性。结果强调了应引入拒判意识的评估框架,并建议将预训练时长视为影响可靠性的关键设计选择,而不仅是计算开销问题。代码已开源于GitHub。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Self-supervised learning (SSL) is now a standard way to pretrain medical image models, but performance is still mostly judged by downstream accuracy. For safety-critical screening tasks such as diabetic retinopathy grading, this is not enough: a model must also know when its predictions are unreliable and defer uncertain cases for clinical review. In this work, we examine how the length of SSL pretraining influences calibrated confidence and confidence-based abstention. We evaluate multiple SSL checkpoints under a fixed fine-tuning protocol and assess calibrated confidence, coverage, selective accuracy, and selective macro-F1. Across datasets and data regimes, SSL pretraining improves selective prediction compared to training from scratch. Unlike prior SSL studies that primarily evaluate downstream accuracy or AUROC, we analyze how SSL pretraining duration influences confidence behavior under calibrated confidence-based abstention. However, once accuracy saturates, selective performance can still change markedly across checkpoints, and longer pretraining does not consistently improve reliability. These results underscore the importance of abstention-aware evaluation and suggest that pretraining length should be treated as an important reliability-related design choice rather than only a computational detail. Code is available at GitHub.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。