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Main Authors: Ma, Yingzhe, Yang, Xiao, Yin, Yuguo, Wang, Zheyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12929
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author Ma, Yingzhe
Yang, Xiao
Yin, Yuguo
Wang, Zheyu
author_facet Ma, Yingzhe
Yang, Xiao
Yin, Yuguo
Wang, Zheyu
contents Retinal diagnosis is inherently bilateral: clinicians compare homologous structures across eyes (e.g., optic disc asymmetry), yet most deep models operate on monocular representations. We investigate whether explicit structural correspondence improves diagnosis, and propose Anatomy-Slot to operationalize this hypothesis. Anatomy-Slot introduces an unsupervised anatomical bottleneck by decomposing patch tokens into a set of emergent, structurally-coherent slots that correspond to anatomical regions, then aligning these slots across eyes via bidirectional cross-attention. On ODIR-5K with $n=10$ seeds, the method improves AUC by $4.2$ points over a matched ViT-L baseline (95% CIs; Wilcoxon signed-rank test, $W=0$, $p=0.002$). Pairing disruption and stress testing under Gaussian noise provide controlled tests of correspondence dependence and robustness under corruption. We further report quantitative optic disc grounding on REFUGE and cross-attention localization analysis. Beyond the reported gains, these results indicate that object-centric anatomical correspondence offers a principled path toward interpretable diagnostic systems aligned with clinical bilateral comparison.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12929
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Anatomy-Slot: Unsupervised Anatomical Factorization for Homologous Bilateral Reasoning in Retinal Diagnosis
Ma, Yingzhe
Yang, Xiao
Yin, Yuguo
Wang, Zheyu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Retinal diagnosis is inherently bilateral: clinicians compare homologous structures across eyes (e.g., optic disc asymmetry), yet most deep models operate on monocular representations. We investigate whether explicit structural correspondence improves diagnosis, and propose Anatomy-Slot to operationalize this hypothesis. Anatomy-Slot introduces an unsupervised anatomical bottleneck by decomposing patch tokens into a set of emergent, structurally-coherent slots that correspond to anatomical regions, then aligning these slots across eyes via bidirectional cross-attention. On ODIR-5K with $n=10$ seeds, the method improves AUC by $4.2$ points over a matched ViT-L baseline (95% CIs; Wilcoxon signed-rank test, $W=0$, $p=0.002$). Pairing disruption and stress testing under Gaussian noise provide controlled tests of correspondence dependence and robustness under corruption. We further report quantitative optic disc grounding on REFUGE and cross-attention localization analysis. Beyond the reported gains, these results indicate that object-centric anatomical correspondence offers a principled path toward interpretable diagnostic systems aligned with clinical bilateral comparison.
title Anatomy-Slot: Unsupervised Anatomical Factorization for Homologous Bilateral Reasoning in Retinal Diagnosis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12929