用不确定性感知深度学习分析史前手印性别,提升考古推断可靠性。
Decoding the Past: An Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning Framework for Sex Attribution in Prehistoric Hand Stencils

- 构建多模型集成框架,生成12种轮廓变体以捕捉边界不确定性
- 在当代手部样本上准确率超88%,对史前手印给出带置信度的性别预测
- 融合可解释AI与降维分析,让不确定性能成为考古推断的可靠依据
由于缺乏真实标签、古今人群差异及图像退化带来的不确定性,确定旧石器时代手印创造者的生物性别仍具挑战。传统形态测量法存在性别间结构重叠高、跨人群泛化性差、特征工程主观等问题。本文提出一种不确定性感知的深度学习框架,显式建模、传播并聚合分析流程中的不确定性。该方法结合双图像处理、双轮廓提取、结构化轮廓增强、模型架构多样性与基于集成的决策聚合,为每个手印生成12种可能的轮廓实现,由两组各含10个EfficientNet-B3和MobileViT-S的神经网络(基于14,036个当代手部样本训练)处理。通过三角验证方案,将集成预测与无监督二维潜在空间映射(UMAP + k-NN)及可解释AI空间归因(LayerCAM)结合,确保解剖一致性。在当代数据上,集成模型在老年组准确率超过88%;应用于史前手印时,不仅输出性别预测,还提供内部一致性的置信度,可区分形态稳定与模糊案例。集成预测、潜在空间结构与可解释性分析的收敛表明,不确定性可成为考古推断的可量化成分,实现稳健且可复现的古代岩画解码。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Determining the biological sex of the individuals who created Upper Paleolithic hand stencils remains a challenging problem due to the absence of ground truth, population differences between contemporary and prehistoric groups, and the uncertainty introduced by image degradation. Traditional morphometric methods suffer from high structural overlap across sexes, poor cross-population generalizability, and subjective feature engineering. This study presents an uncertainty-aware deep learning framework for sex attribution in prehistoric hand stencils that explicitly models, propagates, and aggregates uncertainty throughout the analytical pipeline. The methodology combines dual image processing, dual contour extraction, structured silhouette augmentation, model architectural diversity, and ensemble-based decision aggregation. The pipeline generates twelve plausible silhouette realizations per stencil to capture boundary uncertainties, which are processed by two ensembles of ten deep neural networks each (EfficientNet-B3 and MobileViT-S) trained on 14,036 contemporary hand samples. Furthermore, a triangulated validation scheme integrates ensemble predictions with unsupervised 2D latent-space manifold mapping (UMAP + k-NN) and explainable AI spatial attributions (LayerCAM) to ensure anatomical consistency. On contemporary data, ensemble models achieve strong classification performance, with accuracies exceeding 88% in older age groups. When applied to prehistoric stencils, the framework produces both sex predictions and confidence measures of internal agreement, enabling the distinction between morphologically stable and ambiguous cases. Convergence across ensemble predictions, latent-space structure, and interpretability analyses shows that uncertainty can become a measurable component of archaeological inference, enabling robust and reproducible decoding of ancient rock art.
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