Information Bottleneck-based Causal Attention for Multi-label Medical Image Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cui, Xiaoxiao, Li, Yiran, He, Kai, Jiang, Shanzhi, Xue, Mengli, Li, Wentao, Leng, Junhong, Liu, Zhi, Cui, Lizhen, Li, Shuo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cui, Xiaoxiao
Li, Yiran
He, Kai
Jiang, Shanzhi
Xue, Mengli
Li, Wentao
Leng, Junhong
Liu, Zhi
Cui, Lizhen
Li, Shuo
author_facet Cui, Xiaoxiao
Li, Yiran
He, Kai
Jiang, Shanzhi
Xue, Mengli
Li, Wentao
Leng, Junhong
Liu, Zhi
Cui, Lizhen
Li, Shuo
contents Multi-label classification (MLC) of medical images aims to identify multiple diseases and holds significant clinical potential. A critical step is to learn class-specific features for accurate diagnosis and improved interpretability effectively. However, current works focus primarily on causal attention to learn class-specific features, yet they struggle to interpret the true cause due to the inadvertent attention to class-irrelevant features. To address this challenge, we propose a new structural causal model (SCM) that treats class-specific attention as a mixture of causal, spurious, and noisy factors, and a novel Information Bottleneck-based Causal Attention (IBCA) that is capable of learning the discriminative class-specific attention for MLC of medical images. Specifically, we propose learning Gaussian mixture multi-label spatial attention to filter out class-irrelevant information and capture each class-specific attention pattern. Then a contrastive enhancement-based causal intervention is proposed to gradually mitigate the spurious attention and reduce noise information by aligning multi-head attention with the Gaussian mixture multi-label spatial. Quantitative and ablation results on Endo and MuReD show that IBCA outperforms all methods. Compared to the second-best results for each metric, IBCA achieves improvements of 6.35\% in CR, 7.72\% in OR, and 5.02\% in mAP for MuReD, 1.47\% in CR, and 1.65\% in CF1, and 1.42\% in mAP for Endo.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information Bottleneck-based Causal Attention for Multi-label Medical Image Recognition
Cui, Xiaoxiao
Li, Yiran
He, Kai
Jiang, Shanzhi
Xue, Mengli
Li, Wentao
Leng, Junhong
Liu, Zhi
Cui, Lizhen
Li, Shuo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multi-label classification (MLC) of medical images aims to identify multiple diseases and holds significant clinical potential. A critical step is to learn class-specific features for accurate diagnosis and improved interpretability effectively. However, current works focus primarily on causal attention to learn class-specific features, yet they struggle to interpret the true cause due to the inadvertent attention to class-irrelevant features. To address this challenge, we propose a new structural causal model (SCM) that treats class-specific attention as a mixture of causal, spurious, and noisy factors, and a novel Information Bottleneck-based Causal Attention (IBCA) that is capable of learning the discriminative class-specific attention for MLC of medical images. Specifically, we propose learning Gaussian mixture multi-label spatial attention to filter out class-irrelevant information and capture each class-specific attention pattern. Then a contrastive enhancement-based causal intervention is proposed to gradually mitigate the spurious attention and reduce noise information by aligning multi-head attention with the Gaussian mixture multi-label spatial. Quantitative and ablation results on Endo and MuReD show that IBCA outperforms all methods. Compared to the second-best results for each metric, IBCA achieves improvements of 6.35\% in CR, 7.72\% in OR, and 5.02\% in mAP for MuReD, 1.47\% in CR, and 1.65\% in CF1, and 1.42\% in mAP for Endo.
title Information Bottleneck-based Causal Attention for Multi-label Medical Image Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08069