Transcending the Annotation Bottleneck: AI-Powered Discovery in Biology and Medicine

In real-world clinical practice, medical images face open-world shifts: (i) long-tailed rare diseases, (ii) subtle lesions dominated by normal anatomy, and (iii) hierarchical taxonomies. Yet most open-world paradigms assume flat, balanced label spaces, leaving these biomedical demands unresolved. We introduce Generalized Biomedicine Discovery (GBD) and a unified benchmark spanning long-tail, anomaly, and taxonomy-aware discovery. Our key insight is that dominant known patterns form a visual manifold that masks subtle novelty. Inspired by expert diagnosis, we propose SCAN (Surprise-evoked Complementary AccommodatioN), which follows a cognition-inspired perceptual progression: it applies predictive suppression to filter expected norms, triggers surprise-evoked salience to highlight unexpected deviations, and performs complementary accommodation to integrate these shifts into global representations. Extensive experiments show that SCAN improves novel concept discovery while generally preserving established clinical knowledge, and it plugs into existing architectures to better navigate the known-unknown trade-off in medical imaging. Code is available at https://github.com/lytang63/generalized-biomedicine-discovery.

Medical tabular data are ubiquitous in clinical research, but deep learning for tables remains underexplored because reliable labels often require costly expert adjudication, even though structured clinical variables are routinely available in tabular form. Self-supervised learning can leverage these unlabeled tables, and recent binning-based pretexts offer a promising inductive bias, but existing objectives fix a single global quantile discretization and apply feature-agnostic supervision. We propose Adaptive Binning, a training-adaptive discretization pretext for tabular SSL that couples discretization to learning through a feature-wise coarse-to-fine curriculum. Motivated by the spectral bias of neural networks and the principles of curriculum learning, our method progressively refines discretization per feature upon plateau detection and selects representation-aware splits to jointly improve value-space concentration and representation-space coherence. A heterogeneity-aware objective unifies categorical reconstruction with ordinal supervision for numerical features, and experiments on public medical tabular datasets under unified evaluation protocols show consistent gains for linear probing and fine-tuning without dataset-specific discretization tuning. We further introduce a medical tabular SSL benchmark with standardized protocols to support reproducible progress in this underexplored domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/Adaptive-Binning.

This position paper argues that the absence of labels does not imply the absence of human supervision in visual learning, and urges the research community to identify sources of supervision more explicitly. Many recent methods in computer vision build upon representations learned from large-scale unlabeled data, and are therefore grouped under the same umbrella term unsupervised.'' However, different data curation schemes and training objectives embed substantially different human priors on which models rely, and we argue that one unsupervised'' umbrella term is no longer capturing these distinctions. This ambiguity makes it harder to compare unsupervised learning research conducted under different assumptions, coinciding with a sharp decline in papers titled with ``unsupervised'' in flagship computer vision conferences since 2021, despite continued growth of the field. While we fully embrace pre-training as a strong foundation for modern computer vision, we advocate for a community-level effort toward greater conceptual clarity: authors are encouraged to disclose priors in data selection and learning objectives, and to specify which components of a learning pipeline depend on which assumptions. Standardized disclosure practices can improve academic communication, ensure fairer comparisons, and preserve methodological diversity in unsupervised learning.