arXiv Computer Vision

DART: Depth-as-Target Pretraining for Surgical Vision Foundation Models

DART is a new RGB‑D pretraining method for surgical vision foundation models that incorporates pseudo‑labeled depth maps as a pixel‑space reconstruction target during training. By adding a depth reconstruction head to DINOv2’s masked iBOT framework, DART improves representation quality without affecting downstream RGB‑only fine‑tuning or inference. Across eight surgical benchmarks—including segmentation, depth estimation, and image‑level recognition—DART outperforms both natural‑image and in‑domain baselines, demonstrating that geometric pseudo‑labels can strengthen foundation model pretraining without extra labels or inference cost.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

DALE-CT: Depth-Aware 2D Slice Encoders Learn an Anatomical World Model of Chest CT

DALE-CT introduces depth‑aware 2D slice encoders that learn an anatomical world model of chest CT scans without 3D or positional supervision. By sampling self‑supervised views across a physical $z$‑axis slab, the encoder captures how anatomy changes between neighboring slices, enabling it to recover slice ordering and distinguish slices by anatomy alone. The model, trained on a large 287k‑scan corpus, achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on CT‑RATE and is released with full code and evaluation tools.

By Evan W. Damron, Mahmut S. Gokmen, Mitchell A. Klusty, Caroline N. Leach, Emily B. Collier, V. K. Cody Bumgardner
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

Comprehensive language-image pre-training for 3D medical image understanding

arXiv:2510. 15042v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the 3D medical image domain, vision-language pre-training is used to create vision-language encoders (VLEs) that can support radiologists by retrieving patients with similar abnormalities, predicting likelihoods of abnormality, or, with downstream adaptation, generating radiological reports.

By Tassilo Wald, Ibrahim Ethem Hamamci, Yuan Gao, Sam Bond-Taylor, Harshita Sharma, Maximilian Ilse, Cynthia Lo, Olesya Melnichenko, Anton Schwaighofer, Noel C. F. Codella, Maria Teodora Wetscherek, Klaus H. Maier-Hein, Panagiotis Korfiatis, Valentina Salvatelli, Javier Alvarez-Valle, Fernando P\'erez-Garc\'ia
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Pix2Rep-v2: Data-Efficient Representation Learning for Dense Medical Imaging Applications

Pix2Rep-v2 is a self‑supervised learning framework that learns pixel‑ and voxel‑level representations for dense medical imaging tasks, using a redundancy‑reduction objective and equivariance principles to scale to 3D and wide field‑of‑view data. The method is evaluated on four datasets across multiple modalities, tasks, and backbones, demonstrating higher data‑efficiency in few‑shot scenarios and competitive performance, such as a +9.3 Dice point improvement in one‑shot segmentation on the M&Ms‑2 dataset. An in‑context dense prototype approach is also proposed, eliminating the need for downstream training.

By S. Sifaoui, E. Angelini, S. Toupin, T. Pezel, L. Le Folgoc
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Object Concepts Emerge from Motion

The paper introduces a biologically inspired framework that learns object‑centric visual representations from raw videos without human annotations or camera calibration. By using motion boundaries detected via optical flow and clustering to create pseudo‑instance masks, the method supervises a single‑image encoder with pixel‑level pairwise metric learning. Training on 195 million pseudo‑labeled frames and expanding to 421 million frames through Motion‑Verified Self‑Training, the approach yields Swin‑based encoders that outperform or match supervised and self‑supervised baselines on tasks such as monocular depth estimation, 3D object detection, 3D occupancy prediction, and end‑to‑end planning.

By Boshi Li, Xiaohui Wang, Xiaoyang Wu, Zhichao Li, Ya Yang, Naiyan Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Anatomy-Anchored Self-Supervision: Distilling Vision Foundation Models for Invariant Ultrasound Representation

arXiv:2605. 25402v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-supervised pre-training paradigm has gained increasing prominence for learning transferable representations in medical imaging, yet existing methods for ultrasound (US) images operate at the image or frame level, overlooking the anatomical context for clinical-aligned representation learning.

By Chunzheng Zhu, Yijun Wang, Jianxin Lin, Feng Wang, Hongwei Wang, Lei Zhao, Shengli Li, Kenli Li
arXiv AI
Jun 17

Geometry-Consistent Endoscopic Representations for Image-Guided Navigation via Structured Foundation Model Adaptation

arXiv:2606. 17340v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate vision-based navigation in monocular endoscopy is difficult due to limited depth cues, weak tissue texture, non-rigid deformation, and substantial appearance variation across domains, all of which complicate pose estimation, depth prediction, and image-to-anatomy alignment.

By Hongchao Shu, Roger D. Soberanis-Mukul, Hao Ding, Morgan Ringel, Mali Shen, Saif Iftekar Sayed, Hedyeh Rafii-Tari, Mathias Unberath
arXiv AI
Jul 7

MetricAnything: Scaling Metric Depth Pretraining with Noisy Heterogeneous Sources

arXiv:2601. 22054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling has powered recent advances in vision foundation models, yet extending this paradigm to metric depth estimation remains challenging due to heterogeneous sensor noise, camera-dependent biases, and metric ambiguity in noisy cross-source 3D data.

By Baorui Ma, Jiahui Yang, Donglin Di, Xuancheng Zhang, Jianxun Cui, Hao Li, Yan Xie, Wei Chen