Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields in Efficient CNNs for Fair Medical Image Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wu, Xiao, Zhang, Xiaoqing, Xiao, Zunjie, Hu, Lingxi, Higashita, Risa, Liu, Jiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wu, Xiao
Zhang, Xiaoqing
Xiao, Zunjie
Hu, Lingxi
Higashita, Risa
Liu, Jiang
author_facet Wu, Xiao
Zhang, Xiaoqing
Xiao, Zunjie
Hu, Lingxi
Higashita, Risa
Liu, Jiang
contents Efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture design has attracted growing research interests. However, they typically apply single receptive field (RF), small asymmetric RFs, or pyramid RFs to learn different feature representations, still encountering two significant challenges in medical image classification tasks: 1) They have limitations in capturing diverse lesion characteristics efficiently, e.g., tiny, coordination, small and salient, which have unique roles on the classification results, especially imbalanced medical image classification. 2) The predictions generated by those CNNs are often unfair/biased, bringing a high risk when employing them to real-world medical diagnosis conditions. To tackle these issues, we develop a new concept, Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields (ERoHPRF), to simultaneously boost medical image classification performance and fairness. This concept aims to mimic the multi-expert consultation mode by applying the well-designed heterogeneous pyramid RF bag to capture lesion characteristics with varying significances effectively via convolution operations with multiple heterogeneous kernel sizes. Additionally, ERoHPRF introduces an expert-like structural reparameterization technique to merge its parameters with the two-stage strategy, ensuring competitive computation cost and inference speed through comparisons to a single RF. To manifest the effectiveness and generalization ability of ERoHPRF, we incorporate it into mainstream efficient CNN architectures. The extensive experiments show that our proposed ERoHPRF maintains a better trade-off than state-of-the-art methods in terms of medical image classification, fairness, and computation overhead. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/XiaoLing12138/Expert-Like-Reparameterization-of-Heterogeneous-Pyramid-Receptive-Fields.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13039
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields in Efficient CNNs for Fair Medical Image Classification
Wu, Xiao
Zhang, Xiaoqing
Xiao, Zunjie
Hu, Lingxi
Higashita, Risa
Liu, Jiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture design has attracted growing research interests. However, they typically apply single receptive field (RF), small asymmetric RFs, or pyramid RFs to learn different feature representations, still encountering two significant challenges in medical image classification tasks: 1) They have limitations in capturing diverse lesion characteristics efficiently, e.g., tiny, coordination, small and salient, which have unique roles on the classification results, especially imbalanced medical image classification. 2) The predictions generated by those CNNs are often unfair/biased, bringing a high risk when employing them to real-world medical diagnosis conditions. To tackle these issues, we develop a new concept, Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields (ERoHPRF), to simultaneously boost medical image classification performance and fairness. This concept aims to mimic the multi-expert consultation mode by applying the well-designed heterogeneous pyramid RF bag to capture lesion characteristics with varying significances effectively via convolution operations with multiple heterogeneous kernel sizes. Additionally, ERoHPRF introduces an expert-like structural reparameterization technique to merge its parameters with the two-stage strategy, ensuring competitive computation cost and inference speed through comparisons to a single RF. To manifest the effectiveness and generalization ability of ERoHPRF, we incorporate it into mainstream efficient CNN architectures. The extensive experiments show that our proposed ERoHPRF maintains a better trade-off than state-of-the-art methods in terms of medical image classification, fairness, and computation overhead. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/XiaoLing12138/Expert-Like-Reparameterization-of-Heterogeneous-Pyramid-Receptive-Fields.
title Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields in Efficient CNNs for Fair Medical Image Classification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13039