Ordinal Label-Distribution Learning with Constrained Asymmetric Priors for Imbalanced Retinal Grading
Diabetic retinopathy grading is inherently ordinal and long-tailed, with minority stages being scarce, heterogeneous, and clinically critical to detect accurately. Conventional methods often rely on isotropic Gaussian priors and symmetric loss functions, misaligning latent representations with the task's asymmetric nature. We propose the Constrained Asymmetric Prior Wasserstein Autoencoder (CAP-WAE), a novel framework that addresses these challenges through three key innovations. Our approach employs a Wasserstein Autoencoder (WAE) that aligns its aggregate posterior with a asymmetric prior, preserving the heavy-tailed and skewed structure of minority classes. The latent space is further structured by a Margin-Aware Orthogonality and Compactness (MAOC) loss to ensure grade-ordered separability. At the supervision level, we introduce a direction-aware ordinal loss, where a lightweight head predicts asymmetric dispersions to generate soft labels that reflect clinical priorities by penalizing under-grading more severely. Stabilized by an adaptive multi-task weighting scheme, our end-to-end model requires minimal tuning. Across public DR benchmarks, CAP-WAE consistently achieves state-of-the-art Quadratic Weighted Kappa, accuracy, and macro-F1, surpassing both ordinal classification and latent generative baselines. t-SNE visualizations further reveal that our method reshapes the latent manifold into compact, grade-ordered clusters with reduced overlap.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Diabetic Retinopathy GradingOrdinal ClassificationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Asymmetric Distributions from Constrained Mixtures
This paper introduces constrained mixtures for continuous distributions, characterized by a mixture of distributions where each distribution has a shape similar to the base distribution and disjoint domains. This new con…
Time SeriesTime Series AnalysisOrdinal Adaptive Correction: A Data-Centric Approach to Ordinal Image Classification with Noisy Labels
Labeled data is a fundamental component in training supervised deep learning models for computer vision tasks. However, the labeling process, especially for ordinal image classification where class boundaries are often a…
Ordinal ClassificationImage ClassificationAge EstimationNon-parametric Uni-modality Constraints for Deep Ordinal Classification
We propose a new constrained-optimization formulation for deep ordinal classification, in which uni-modality of the label distribution is enforced implicitly via a set of inequality constraints over all the pairs of adja…
ClassificationGeneral ClassificationHistorical Color Image DatingOrdinal ClassificationCORE: Learning Consistent Ordinal REpresentations for Image Ordinal Estimation
The goal of image ordinal estimation is to estimate the ordinal label of a given image with a convolutional neural network. Existing methods are mainly based on ordinal regression and particularly focus on modeling the o…
regressionLearning-to-Rank Meets Language: Boosting Language-Driven Ordering Alignment for Ordinal Classification
We present a novel language-driven ordering alignment method for ordinal classification. The labels in ordinal classification contain additional ordering relations, making them prone to overfitting when relying solely on…
Age EstimationClassificationLearning-To-RankOrdinal Classification