Effective multi-task learning for surgical scene understanding is fundamentally hindered by annotation granularity mismatch; temporal workflow tasks such as phase recognition, step recognition and anticipation benefit from dense frame-level supervision, whereas pixel-level spatial tasks including instrument segmentation and action recognition are only sparsely annotated on selected keyframes due to prohibitive labeling costs. This supervision imbalance undermines shared representation learning and limits joint optimization across heterogeneous surgical tasks.
arXiv:2607. 17508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Retrieval-Augmented Interpretable Learning (RAIL), a probabilistic meta-learning framework for zero-shot generation of task-specific interpretable models that synthesizes coefficient-space structure from natural-language task descriptions and a memory of previously learned task-specific predictors.
By Sazan Mahbub, Caleb Ellington, Zhiyuan Li, Yixin Yang, Souvik Kundu, Ben Lengerich, Eric P. Xing
The paper introduces SurgFUTR, a state‑change learning framework for predicting future events in endoscopic videos. Instead of forecasting raw observations, it classifies transitions between current and future states using a teacher‑student architecture and an Action Dynamics module. The authors also present SFPBench, a benchmark with five short‑ and long‑term prediction tasks, and demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple datasets and procedures, including cross‑procedure transfer.
By Saurav Sharma, Chinedu Innocent Nwoye, Didier Mutter, Nicolas Padoy
arXiv:2608.24541v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) is fundamental for computer-assisted surgery, where reliable instrument masks enable precise scene understanding...
By Xinning Yao, Jingjing Wang, Jinghua Yue, Xiaoyan Luo, Fugen Zhou, Bo Liu
Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) is fundamental for computer-assisted surgery, where reliable instrument masks enable precise scene understanding and clinical assistance. Recently, adapting foun...
arXiv:2608.31065v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Surgical phase recognition is key to context-aware computer-assisted feedback in vitreoretinal procedures, yet the scarcity of synchronized multimodal...
By Onur Izmitlioglu, Shervin Dehghani, Tarek Ghannoum, Benedikt Schworm, Nassir Navab