MIFR: A Modality-Invariant and Fair Representation Framework for Skin Disease Classification
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The paper introduces MIFR, a modality‑invariant and fair representation framework for skin disease classification that jointly processes clinical photographs and dermoscopic images using ViT‑based encoders. It employs a five‑component multi‑objective loss to balance classification accuracy, fairness across skin tones, class alignment, and modality invariance. Experiments on paired and external datasets demonstrate competitive predictive performance and fairness, with t‑SNE visualizations confirming alignment of embeddings from different modalities.
The paper evaluates how well generalist and dermatology-specific machine learning models perform on diverse skin lesion datasets, including dermoscopic images and smartphone photographs. It benchmarks a range of architectures—general-purpose vision-language models, foundation models, and task-specific dermatology classifiers—under conditions of distribution shift, modality change, and demographic variability. The study quantifies the performance gap between current state‑of‑the‑art models and the robustness needed for safe, equitable clinical deployment.
arXiv:2609.36400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning classifiers for dermoscopic skin lesions often reach high in-distribution accuracy while quietly relying on spurious background cues su...
The study examines why dermatology AI models, largely trained on light‑skinned, cancer‑focused images, perform poorly when applied to diverse patient populations. By comparing a cancer‑trained baseline, two dermatology foundation models, and a general‑purpose vision model on tone‑stratified and disease‑shifted datasets, the authors find that disease‑distribution shift, rather than skin‑tone underrepresentation, is the primary cause of generalization failure. Representation analysis shows that cancer‑specialized features lack transferable structure, while dermatology‑pretrained features maintain stronger clustering, and lightweight adaptation with about ten labeled examples per category can recover most performance.
Accurate dermatological diagnosis naturally necessitates equitable performance across diverse populations, yet a systematic lack of expertly annotated images, especially for underrepresented skin tones and rare diseases, impedes progress toward measurably fair methods. We introduce cgDDI (Controllable Generation of Diverse Dermatological Imagery), a hybrid framework that (1) synthesizes realistic healthy skin samples without disturbing other input properties, (2) maps single-sample rare lesions onto novel skin-tones and locations non-parametrically, and (3) allows for efficient parametric generation with as few as 10 training samples.
arXiv:2606. 26712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skin lesion segmentation is a key task in computer-aided dermatological diagnosis, where accuracy directly impacts downstream analysis and disease classification.