Image Classification

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Overview

Image classification studies how to assign one or more labels to an image, supporting applications from species identification and medical diagnosis to document processing and remote sensing. Common approaches include convolutional neural networks, vision transformers, and pretrained vision-language models, trained with supervised, self-supervised, transfer, or few-shot learning. Researchers also develop data augmentation, hierarchical prediction, uncertainty estimation, and efficient models for settings such as ImageNet, corruption benchmarks, and specialized domain datasets. A central challenge is that strong accuracy on standard test sets may not transfer under distribution shifts or reveal reliance on spurious cues, while improving robustness, calibration, and efficiency can involve trade-offs.

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390 papers29 papers in the last four weeks, down 34% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Apr 1, 2026

Dynamic Graph Neural Network with Adaptive Features Selection for RGB-D Based Indoor Scene Recognition

Multi-modality of color and depth, i.e., RGB-D, is of great importance in recent research of indoor scene recognition. In this kind of data representation, depth map is able to describe the 3D structure of scenes and geometric relations among objects. Previous works showed that local features of both modalities are vital for promotion of recognition accuracy. However, the problem of adaptive selection and effective exploitation on these key local features remains open in this field. In this paper, a dynamic graph model is proposed with adaptive node selection mechanism to solve the above problem. In this model, a dynamic graph is built up to model the relations among objects and scene, and a method of adaptive node selection is proposed to take key local features from both modalities of RGB and depth for graph modeling. After that, these nodes are grouped by three different levels, representing near or far relations among objects. Moreover, the graph model is updated dynamically according to attention weights. Finally, the updated and optimized features of RGB and depth modalities are fused together for indoor scene recognition. Experiments are performed on public datasets including SUN RGB-D and NYU Depth v2. Extensive results demonstrate that our method has superior performance when comparing to state-of-the-arts methods, and show that the proposed method is able to exploit crucial local features from both modalities of RGB and depth.

Qiong Liu, Ruofei Xiong, Xingzhen Chen +2

School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, No. 1037, Luoyu Rd., Wuhan, 430074, P. R. China

Multimodal Graph LearningDynamic Graph LearningFeature SelectionImage Classification
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Mar 31, 2026

Label-efficient underwater image classification with logistic regression on frozen foundation model embeddings

Underwater image classification is constrained by the cost of annotation and by the computational and methodological requirements of task-specific model development. We investigate whether frozen general-purpose foundation-model embeddings can reduce these requirements by extracting DINOv3 ViT-B/16 embeddings and training only a logistic regression classifier on the AQUA20 benchmark. We evaluate the approach across a range of annotation budgets, a repeated 80% training-subsample evaluation, and a full-training refit. With only 13 labelled images per category, corresponding to approximately 4% of the benchmark's official training partition, mean macro F1 reaches 81.8%; with 144 images per category it reaches 88.5%, compared to the published fully supervised ConvNeXt point estimate of 88.9% obtained with the complete training set (benchmark results reported without run-to-run variability). Using all official training labels, macro F1 reaches 91.5% (bootstrap 95% CI: 89.0-93.7%). Sensitivity analyses show that the main findings remain stable across ordinary downstream implementation choices, and persist after removing duplicate and near-duplicate test images identified in an audit of the official split. Preliminary evaluation on a second dataset suggests that overall performance level and the shape of the label efficiency curve are not unique to the AQUA20 dataset. Because the DINOv3 backbone remains frozen and only the downstream classifier is fitted, the approach avoids task-specific neural-network training and can be executed on commodity hardware. These findings establish linear classification on frozen foundation-model embeddings as a practical baseline for label-efficient underwater image classification.

Thomas Manuel Rost, Martina Figlia, F. Morgado-Dias +1

University of Madeira, Faculty of Exact Sciences and Engineering, Funchal, Portugal · Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI/LARSyS), ARDITI, Funchal, Portugal · Wave Labs, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Madeira, Portugal +4

Image ClassificationFew-Shot Image ClassificationLinear ProbingVision Foundation Models
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Mar 31, 2026

Lead Zirconate Titanate Reservoir Computing for Classification of Written and Spoken Digits

In this paper we extend our earlier work of (Rietman et al. 2022) presenting an application of physical Reservoir Computing (RC) to the classification of handwritten and spoken digits. We utilize an unpoled cube of Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) as a computational substrate to process these datasets. Our results demonstrate that the PZT reservoir achieves 89.0% accuracy on MNIST handwritten digits, representing a 2.4 percentage point improvement over logistic regression baselines applied to the same preprocessed data. However, for the AudioMNIST spoken digits dataset, the reservoir system (88.2% accuracy) performs equivalently to baseline methods (88.1% accuracy), suggesting that reservoir computing provides the greatest benefits for classification tasks of intermediate difficulty where linear methods underperform but the problem remains learnable. PZT is a well-known material already used in semiconductor applications, presenting a low-power computational substrate that can be integrated with digital algorithms. Our findings indicate that physical reservoirs excel when the task difficulty exceeds the capability of simple linear classifiers but remains within the computational capacity of the reservoir dynamics.

Thomas Buckley, Leslie Schumm, Manor Askenazi +1

Manning College of Information and Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003 · Now at Harvard · Independent Researcher, Chicago, IL +2

Handwritten Digit RecognitionReservoir ComputingImage ClassificationOptical Character Recognition
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Mar 31, 2026

Dual-Imbalance Continual Learning for Real-World Food Recognition

Visual food recognition in real-world dietary logging scenarios naturally exhibits severe data imbalance, where a small number of food categories appear frequently while many others occur rarely, resulting in long-tailed class distributions. In practice, food recognition systems often operate in a continual learning setting, where new categories are introduced sequentially over time. However, existing studies typically assume that each incremental step introduces a similar number of new food classes, which rarely happens in real world where the number of newly observed categories can vary significantly across steps, leading to highly uneven learning dynamics. As a result, continual food recognition exhibits a dual imbalance: imbalanced samples within each food class and imbalanced numbers of new food classes to learn at each incremental learning step. In this work, we introduce DIME, a Dual-Imbalance-aware Adapter Merging framework for continual food recognition. DIME learns lightweight adapters for each task using parameter-efficient fine-tuning and progressively integrates them through a class-count guided spectral merging strategy. A rank-wise threshold modulation mechanism further stabilizes the merging process by preserving dominant knowledge while allowing adaptive updates. The resulting model maintains a single merged adapter for inference, enabling efficient deployment without accumulating task-specific modules. Experiments on realistic long-tailed food benchmarks under our step-imbalanced setup show that the proposed method consistently improves by more than 3% over the strongest existing continual learning baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyanzhang1/DIME.

Xiaoyan Zhang, Jiangpeng He

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A · Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A

Class-Incremental LearningIncremental LearningImage ClassificationModel Merging
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Mar 30, 2026

MEDiC: Multi-objective Exploration of Distillation from CLIP

Masked image modeling (MIM) methods typically operate in either raw pixel space (reconstructing masked patches) or latent feature space (aligning with a pre-trained teacher). We present MEDiC (Multi-objective Exploration of Distillation from CLIP), a framework that combines both spaces in a single pipeline through three complementary objectives: patch-level token distillation from a frozen CLIP encoder, global CLS alignment, and pixel reconstruction via a lightweight decoder. We conduct a systematic investigation of the design space surrounding this multi-objective framework. First, we show that all three objectives provide complementary information, with the full combination reaching 73.9% kNN accuracy on ImageNet-1K. Second, we introduce hierarchical clustering with relative position bias for evolved masking and find that, despite producing more semantically coherent masks than prior methods, evolved masking does not outperform simple block masking in the teacher-guided distillation setting, a finding we attribute to the teacher's inherent semantic awareness. Third, we reveal that optimal scalar loss weights are extremely fragile, with small perturbations causing drops of up to 17 percentage points in kNN accuracy. Our framework achieves 73.9% kNN and 85.1% fine-tuning accuracy with ViT-Base at 300 epochs.

Konstantinos Georgiou, Maofeng Tang, Hairong Qi

Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science The University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996

Masked Image ModelingVLM DistillationFeature-Based Knowledge DistillationImage Classification
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Mar 30, 2026

Embedding-Only Uplink for Onboard Retrieval Under Shift in Remote Sensing

Downlink bottlenecks motivate onboard systems that prioritize hazards without transmitting raw pixels. We study a strict setting where a ground station uplinks only compact embeddings plus metadata, and an onboard system performs vector search to triage new captures. We ask whether this embedding-only pipeline remains useful under explicit remote-sensing shift: cross-time (pre/post-event), cross-event/location (different disasters), cross-site cloud (15 geographic sites), and cross-city AOI holdout (buildings). Using OlmoEarth embeddings on a scaled public multi-task benchmark (27 Sentinel-2 L2A scenes, 15 cloud sites, 5 SpaceNet-2 AOIs; 10 seeds), we find that all effective methods rely on the same uplinked embeddings, but the optimal decision head is task-dependent: kNN retrieval is significantly superior for cloud classification (0.92 vs. centroid 0.91; p<0.01, Wilcoxon), while class centroids dominate temporal change detection (0.85 vs. retrieval 0.48; p<0.01). These results show that embedding-only uplink is the key enabler--once embeddings are onboard, the system can select the best head per task at no additional uplink cost, with all telemetry under 1 KB per query.

Sangcheol Sim

Telepix

Domain GeneralizationDense RetrievalImage Classification
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Mar 28, 2026

EVA: Bridging Performance and Human Alignment in Hard-Attention Vision Models for Image Classification

Optimizing vision models purely for classification accuracy can impose an alignment tax, degrading human-like scanpaths and limiting interpretability. We introduce EVA, a neuroscience-inspired hard-attention mechanistic testbed that makes the performance-human-likeness trade-off explicit and adjustable. EVA samples a small number of sequential glimpses using a minimal fovea-periphery representation with CNN-based feature extractor and integrates variance control and adaptive gating to stabilize and regulate attention dynamics. EVA is trained with the standard classification objective without gaze supervision. On CIFAR-10 with dense human gaze annotations, EVA improves scanpath alignment under established metrics such as DTW, NSS, while maintaining competitive accuracy. Ablations show that CNN-based feature extraction drives accuracy but suppresses human-likeness, whereas variance control and gating restore human-aligned trajectories with minimal performance loss. We further validate EVA's scalability on ImageNet-100 and evaluate scanpath alignment on COCO-Search18 without COCO-Search18 gaze supervision or finetuning, where EVA yields human-like scanpaths on natural scenes without additional training. Overall, EVA provides a principled framework for trustworthy, human-interpretable active vision.

Pengcheng Pan, Yonekura Shogo, Kuniyoshi Yasuo

The University of Tokyo

Scanpath PredictionActive VisionVisual AttentionActive PerceptionImage Classification
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Mar 26, 2026

NERO-Net: A Neuroevolutionary Approach for the Design of Adversarially Robust CNNs

Neuroevolution automates the complex task of neural network design but often ignores the inherent adversarial fragility of evolved models which is a barrier to adoption in safety-critical scenarios. While robust training methods have received significant attention, the design of architectures exhibiting intrinsic robustness remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose NERO-Net, a neuroevolutionary approach to design convolutional neural networks better equipped to resist adversarial attacks. Our search strategy isolates architectural influence on robustness by avoiding adversarial training during the evolutionary loop. As such, our fitness function promotes candidates that, even trained with standard (non-robust) methods, achieve high post-attack accuracy without sacrificing the accuracy on clean samples. We assess NERO-Net on CIFAR-10 with a specific focus on L∞L_\infty-robustness. In particular, the fittest individual emerged from evolutionary search with 33% accuracy against FGSM, used as an efficient estimator for robustness during the search phase, while maintaining 87% clean accuracy. Further standard training of this individual boosted these metrics to 47% adversarial and 93% clean accuracy, suggesting inherent architectural robustness. Adversarial training brings the overall accuracy of the model up to 40% against AutoAttack.

Inês Valentim, Nuno Antunes, Nuno Lourenço

University of Coimbra, CISUC/LASI, DEI, Coimbra, Portugal

Adversarial RobustnessConvolutional Neural NetworksNeuroevolutionNeural Architecture SearchImage Classification
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Mar 26, 2026

Vision Hopfield Memory Networks for Image Recognition

Recent vision backbones, such as Transformer families and state-space models like Mamba, have achieved remarkable progress on image recognition. Despite their empirical success, these architectures remain far from the computational principles of the human brain, often demanding enormous amounts of training data while offering limited interpretability. We propose the Vision Hopfield Memory Network (V-HMN), a brain-inspired vision backbone that integrates hierarchical memory mechanisms across layers with iterative refinement updates. Specifically, V-HMN incorporates local Hopfield modules that provide associative memory dynamics at the image patch level, global Hopfield modules that function as episodic memory for contextual modulation, and a predictive-coding-inspired refinement rule for iterative error correction. By organizing these memory-based modules hierarchically, V-HMN captures both local and global dynamics in a unified framework. Memory retrieval exposes the relationship between inputs and stored patterns, providing a prototype-based form of interpretability through explicit memory retrieval, while the reuse of stored patterns improves data efficiency. This brain-inspired design therefore enhances data efficiency and provides a prototype-based form of interpretability compared to existing self-attention- or state-space-based approaches. We conducted extensive experiments on public image classification benchmarks. V-HMN achieves strong performance on small- and medium-scale benchmarks, and remains competitive with widely adopted backbone architectures on ImageNet despite minimal architectural tuning, while offering improved data efficiency and a prototype-based form of interpretability. These findings highlight the potential of V-HMN as a memory-centric alternative to standard vision backbones, thereby bridging brain-inspired computation with modern machine learning.

Jianfeng Wang, Amine M'Charrak, Luk Koska +6

Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, United Kingdom · Faculty of Informatics, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Memory-Augmented Neural NetworksHopfield NetworksImage ClassificationNeural Network Interpretability
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Mar 26, 2026

FD2^2: A Dedicated Framework for Fine-Grained Dataset Distillation

Dataset distillation (DD) compresses a large training set into a small synthetic set, reducing storage and training cost, and has shown strong results on general benchmarks. Decoupled DD further improves efficiency by splitting the pipeline into pretraining, sample distillation, and soft-label generation. However, existing decoupled methods largely rely on coarse class-label supervision and optimize samples within each class in a nearly identical manner. On fine-grained datasets, this often yields distilled samples that (i) retain large intra-class variation with subtle inter-class differences and (ii) become overly similar within the same class, limiting localized discriminative cues and hurting recognition. To solve the above-mentioned problems, we propose FD2^{2}, a dedicated framework for Fine-grained Dataset Distillation. FD2^{2} localizes discriminative regions and constructs fine-grained representations for distillation. During pretraining, counterfactual attention learning aggregates discriminative representations to update class prototypes. During distillation, a fine-grained characteristic constraint aligns each sample with its class prototype while repelling others, and a similarity constraint diversifies attention across same-class samples. Experiments on multiple fine-grained and general datasets show that FD2^{2} integrates seamlessly with decoupled DD and improves performance in most settings, indicating strong transferability. Code is available at https://github.com/Guang000/FD2.

Hongxu Ma, Guang Li, Shijie Wang +5

Zhejiang University · Hokkaido University · The University of Queensland +2

Fine-Grained Image ClassificationDataset DistillationImage Classification
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Mar 26, 2026

MoireMix: A Formula-Based Data Augmentation for Improving Image Classification Robustness

Data augmentation is a key technique for improving the robustness of image classification models. However, many recent approaches rely on diffusion-based synthesis or complex feature mixing strategies, which introduce substantial computational overhead or require external datasets. In this work, we explore a different direction: procedural augmentation based on analytic interference patterns. Unlike conventional augmentation methods that rely on stochastic noise, feature mixing, or generative models, our approach exploits Moire interference to generate structured perturbations spanning a wide range of spatial frequencies. We propose a lightweight augmentation method that procedurally generates Moire textures on-the-fly using a closed-form mathematical formulation. The patterns are synthesized directly in memory with negligible computational cost (0.0026 seconds per image), mixed with training images during training, and immediately discarded, enabling a storage-free augmentation pipeline without external data. Extensive experiments with Vision Transformers demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves robustness across multiple benchmarks, including ImageNet-C, ImageNet-R, and adversarial benchmarks, outperforming standard augmentation baselines and existing external-data-free augmentation approaches. These results suggest that analytic interference patterns provide a practical and efficient alternative to data-driven generative augmentation methods.

Yuto Matsuo, Yoshihiro Fukuhara, Yuki M. Asano +3

National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) · Tokyo Denki University · Waseda University +2

Data AugmentationSynthetic Data AugmentationImage ClassificationImage Corruption Robustness
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Mar 25, 2026

Machine vision with small numbers of detected photons per inference

Machine vision, including object recognition and image reconstruction, is a central technology in many consumer devices and scientific instruments. The design of machine-vision systems has been revolutionized by the adoption of end-to-end optimization, in which the optical front end and the post-processing back end are jointly optimized. However, while machine vision currently works extremely well in moderate-light or bright-light situations -- where a camera may detect thousands of photons per pixel and billions of photons per frame -- it is far more challenging in very low-light situations. We introduce photon-aware neuromorphic sensing (PANS), an approach for end-to-end optimization in highly photon-starved scenarios. The training incorporates knowledge of the low photon budget and the stochastic nature of light detection when the average number of photons per pixel is near or less than 1. We report a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration in which we performed low-light image classification using PANS, achieving 73% (82%) accuracy on FashionMNIST with an average of only 4.9 (17) detected photons in total per inference, and 86% (97%) on MNIST with 8.6 (29) detected photons -- orders of magnitude more photon-efficient than conventional approaches. We also report simulation studies showing how PANS could be applied to other classification, event-detection, and image-reconstruction tasks. By taking into account the statistics of measurement results for non-classical states or alternative sensing hardware, PANS could in principle be adapted to enable high-accuracy results in quantum and other photon-starved setups.

Shi-Yuan Ma, Jérémie Laydevant, Mandar M. Sohoni +3

School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA · Present address: Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. · NTT Physics and Informatics Laboratories, NTT Research, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA 94085, USA +2

Image ClassificationHardware-Software Co-DesignNeuromorphic Computing
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Mar 24, 2026

Physical Knot Classification Beyond Accuracy: A Benchmark and Diagnostic Study

Physical knot classification is a challenging fine-grained recognition task in which the intended discriminative cue is rope crossing structure; however, high closed-set accuracy may still arise from low-level appearance shortcuts rather than genuine topological understanding. In this work, we introduce dataset (1,440 images, 10 classes), which trains models on loosely tied knots and evaluates them on tightly dressed configurations to probe whether structure-guided training yields topology-specific gains. We demonstrate that topological distance successfully predicts residual inter-class confusion across multiple backbone architectures, validating the utility of our topology-aware evaluation framework. Furthermore, we propose topology-aware centroid alignment (TACA) and an auxiliary crossing-number prediction objective as two complementary forms of structural supervision. Notably, Swin-T with TACA achieves a consistent positive specificity gain (Delta_spec = +1.18 pp) across all random seeds under the canonical protocol, and auxiliary crossing-number prediction exhibits robust performance across data regimes without the real-versus-random reversal observed for centroid alignment. Causal probes reveal that background changes alone flip 17-32% of predictions and phone-photo accuracy drops by 58-69 percentage points, underscoring that appearance bias remains the principal obstacle to deployment. These results collectively demonstrate that our diagnostic workflow provides a principled and practical tool for evaluating whether a hand-crafted structural prior delivers genuine task-relevant benefit beyond generic regularization.

Shiheng Nie, Yunguang Yue

College of Science, Shihezi University, Shihezi 832003, Xinjiang, China

ClassificationFine-Grained Image ClassificationImage ClassificationShortcut Learning
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Mar 23, 2026

BHDD: A Burmese Handwritten Digit Dataset

We introduce the Burmese Handwritten Digit Dataset (BHDD), a collection of 87,561 grayscale images of handwritten Burmese digits in ten classes. Each image is 28x28 pixels, following the MNIST format. The training set has 60,000 samples split evenly across classes; the test set has 27,561 samples with class frequencies as they arose during collection. Over 150 people of different ages and backgrounds contributed samples. We analyze the dataset's class distribution, pixel statistics, and morphological variation, and identify digit pairs that are easily confused due to the round shapes of the Myanmar script. Simple baselines (an MLP, a two-layer CNN, and an improved CNN with batch normalization and augmentation) reach 99.40%, 99.75%, and 99.83% test accuracy respectively. BHDD is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 at https://github.com/baseresearch/BHDD

Swan Htet Aung, Hein Htet, Htoo Say Wah Khaing +1

Expa.AI Research Team, Yangon, Myanmar

Handwritten Digit RecognitionOptical Character RecognitionImage Classification
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Mar 23, 2026

Ctrl-A: Control-Driven Machine Learning using Adaptive Online Data Augmentation

We introduce ControlAugment (Ctrl-A), an automated data augmentation algorithm for image-vision tasks, which incorporates principles from control theory for online adjustment of augmentation strength distributions during model training. Ctrl-A eliminates the need for initialization of individual augmentation strengths. Instead, augmentation strength distributions are dynamically, and individually, adapted during training based on a control-loop architecture and what we define as relative operation response curves. Using an operation-dependent update procedure provides Ctrl-A with the potential to reduce the use of augmentation operations that negatively impact model performance, alleviating the need to manually engineer augmentation policies for new image classification tasks. Experiments on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN-core, and Tiny ImageNet benchmark datasets using WideResNet-28-10 and ResNet architectures demonstrate that Ctrl-A provides competitive performance across a range of image classification benchmarks.

Jesper B. Christensen, Ciaran Bench, Spencer A. Thomas +4

Danish Fundamental Metrology (DFM), Kogle Allé 5, DK-2970 Hørsholm, Denmark · National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Teddington, United Kingdom · TÜV SÜD, Warrington, United Kingdom +2

Data AugmentationImage Classification
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Mar 20, 2026

End-to-End Optimization of Polarimetric Measurement and Material Classifier

Material classification is a fundamental problem in computer vision and plays a crucial role in scene understanding. Previous studies have explored various material recognition methods based on reflection properties such as color, texture, specularity, and scattering. Among these cues, polarization is particularly valuable because it provides rich material information and enables recognition even at distances where capturing high-resolution texture is impractical. However, measuring polarimetric reflectance properties typically requires multiple modulations of the polarization state of the incident light, making the process time-consuming and often unnecessary for certain recognition tasks. While material classification can be achieved using only a subset of polarimetric measurements, the optimal configuration of measurement angles remains unclear. In this study, we propose an end-to-end optimization framework that jointly learns a material classifier and determines the optimal combinations of rotation angles for polarization elements that control both the incident and reflected light states. Using our Mueller-matrix material dataset, we demonstrate that our method achieves high-accuracy material classification even with a limited number of measurements.

Ryota Maeda, Naoki Arikawa, Yutaka No +1

Graduate School of Engineering, University of Hyogo, Himeji, Japan

Polarimetric ImagingImage Classification
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Mar 20, 2026

Mixture of Experts with Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss: Resolving Expert Collapse via Representation Disentanglement

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model uses a set of expert networks that specialize on subsets of a dataset under the supervision of a gating network. A common issue in MoE architectures is ``expert collapse'' where overlapping class boundaries in the raw input feature space cause multiple experts to learn redundant representations, thus forcing the gating network into rigid routing to compensate. We propose an enhanced MoE architecture that utilizes a feature extractor network optimized using Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss (SNNL) prior to feeding input features to the gating and expert networks. By pre-conditioning the latent space to minimize distances among class-similar data points, we resolve structural expert collapse which results to experts learning highly orthogonal weights. We employ Expert Specialization Entropy and Pairwise Embedding Similarity to quantify this dynamic. We evaluate our experimental approach across four benchmark image classification datasets (MNIST, FashionMNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100), and we show our SNNL-augmented MoE models demonstrate structurally diverse experts which allow the gating network to adopt a more flexible routing strategy. This paradigm significantly improves classification accuracy on the FashionMNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100 datasets.

Abien Fred Agarap, Arnulfo P. Azcarraga

De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines

Mixture of ExpertsMixture-of-Experts ModelsImage ClassificationRepresentation Learning
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Mar 20, 2026

MFil-Mamba: Multi-Filter Scanning for Spatial Redundancy-Aware Visual State Space Models

State Space Models (SSMs), especially recent Mamba architecture, have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling tasks. However, extending SSMs to computer vision remains challenging due to the non-sequential structure of visual data and its complex 2D spatial dependencies. Although several early studies have explored adapting selective SSMs for vision applications, most approaches primarily depend on employing various traversal strategies over the same input. This introduces redundancy and distorts the intricate spatial relationships within images. To address these challenges, we propose MFil-Mamba, a novel visual state space architecture built on a multi-filter scanning backbone. Unlike fixed multi-directional traversal methods, our design enables each scan to capture unique and contextually relevant spatial information while minimizing redundancy. Furthermore, we incorporate an adaptive weighting mechanism to effectively fuse outputs from multiple scans in addition to architectural enhancements. MFil-Mamba achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art models across various benchmarks that include image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. For example, our tiny variant attains 83.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 47.3% box AP and 42.7% mask AP on MS COCO, and 48.5% mIoU on the ADE20K dataset. Code and models are available at https://github.com/puskal-khadka/MFil-Mamba.

Puskal Khadka, KC Santosh

USD Artifical Intelligence Research, Department of Computer Science, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, 57069, USA.

Visual SSMsImage ClassificationSemantic Segmentation
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Mar 20, 2026

Growing Networks with Autonomous Pruning

This paper introduces Growing Networks with Autonomous Pruning (GNAP) for image classification. Unlike traditional convolutional neural networks, GNAP change their size, as well as the number of parameters they are using, during training, in order to best fit the data while trying to use as few parameters as possible. This is achieved through two complementary mechanisms: growth and pruning. GNAP start with few parameters, but their size is expanded periodically during training to add more expressive power each time the network has converged to a saturation point. Between these growing phases, model parameters are trained for classification and pruned simultaneously, with complete autonomy by gradient descent. Growing phases allow GNAP to improve their classification performance, while autonomous pruning allows them to keep as few parameters as possible. Experimental results on several image classification benchmarks show that our approach can train extremely sparse neural networks with high accuracy. For example, on MNIST, we achieved 99.44% accuracy with as few as 6.2k parameters, while on CIFAR10, we achieved 92.2\ accuracy with 157.8k parameters.

Charles De Lambilly, Stefan Duffner

INSA Lyon, CNRS, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Université Lumière Lyon 2, LIRIS, UMR5205, , Villeurbanne, 69621, France

Dynamic Sparse TrainingNeural Network GrowthSparse Neural NetworksNeural Network PruningNeural Network CompressionImage Classification
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Mar 20, 2026

Continual Learning for Food Category Classification Dataset: Enhancing Model Adaptability and Performance

Conventional machine learning pipelines often struggle to recognize categories absent from the original trainingset. This gap typically reduces accuracy, as fixed datasets rarely capture the full diversity of a domain. To address this, we propose a continual learning framework for text-guided food classification. Unlike approaches that require retraining from scratch, our method enables incremental updates, allowing new categories to be integrated without degrading prior knowledge. For example, a model trained on Western cuisines could later learn to classify dishes such as dosa or kimchi. Although further refinements are needed, this design shows promise for adaptive food recognition, with applications in dietary monitoring and personalized nutrition planning.

Piyush Kaushik Bhattacharyya, Devansh Tomar, Shubham Mishra +6

School of Computer Engineering, KIIT University, Bhubaneshwar, India

Continual LearningClass-Incremental LearningImage Classification
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Mar 19, 2026

Vision Tiny Recursion Model (ViTRM): Parameter-Efficient Image Classification via Recursive State Refinement

The success of deep learning in computer vision has been driven by models of increasing scale, from deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to large Vision Transformers (ViT). While effective, these architectures are parameter-intensive and demand significant computational resources, limiting deployment in resource-constrained environments. Inspired by Tiny Recursive Models (TRM), which show that small recursive networks can solve complex reasoning tasks through iterative state refinement, we introduce the Vision Tiny Recursion Model (ViTRM): a parameter-efficient architecture that replaces the LL-layer ViT encoder with a single tiny kk-layer block (k=3k{=}3) applied recursively NN times. Despite using up to 6×6 \times and 84×84 \times fewer parameters than CNN based models and ViT respectively, ViTRM maintains competitive performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. This demonstrates that recursive computation is a viable, parameter-efficient alternative to architectural depth in vision.

Ange-Clément Akazan, Abdoulaye Koroko, Verlon Roel Mbingui +3

ΣηiGmα Research Group · AIMS RIC · SaH Analytics International

Image ClassificationEfficient ViTsVision Transformer
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Mar 19, 2026

VeloxNet: Efficient Spatial Gating for Lightweight Embedded Image Classification

Deploying deep learning models on embedded devices for tasks such as aerial disaster monitoring and infrastructure inspection requires architectures that balance accuracy with strict constraints on model size, memory, and latency. This paper introduces VeloxNet, a lightweight CNN architecture that replaces SqueezeNet's fire modules with gated multi-layer perceptron (gMLP) blocks for embedded image classification. Each gMLP block uses a spatial gating unit (SGU) that applies learned spatial projections and multiplicative gating, enabling the network to capture spatial dependencies across the full feature map in a single layer. Unlike fire modules, which are limited to local receptive fields defined by small convolutional kernels, the SGU provides global spatial modeling at each layer with fewer parameters. We evaluate VeloxNet on three aerial image datasets: the Aerial Image Database for Emergency Response (AIDER), the Comprehensive Disaster Dataset (CDD), and the Levee Defect Dataset (LDD), comparing against eleven baselines including MobileNet variants, ShuffleNet, EfficientNet, and recent vision transformers. VeloxNet reduces the parameter count by 46.1% relative to SqueezeNet (from 740,970 to 399,366) while improving weighted F1 scores by 6.32% on AIDER, 30.83% on CDD, and 2.51% on LDD. These results demonstrate that substituting local convolutional modules with spatial gating blocks can improve both classification accuracy and parameter efficiency for resource-constrained deployment. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

Md Meftahul Ferdaus, Elias Ioup, Mahdi Abdelguerfi +4

Canizaro Livingston Gulf States Center for Environmental Informatics, the University of New Orleans, New Orleans, USA · Center for Geospatial Sciences, Naval Research Laboratory, Stennis Space Center, Hancock County, Mississippi, USA · US Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA

Image ClassificationLightweight CNNsEdge InferenceMultilayer Perceptrons
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Mar 19, 2026

Revisiting Autoregressive Models for Generative Image Classification

Class-conditional generative models have emerged as accurate and robust classifiers, with diffusion models demonstrating clear advantages over other visual generative paradigms, including autoregressive (AR) models. In this work, we revisit visual AR-based generative classifiers and identify an important limitation of prior approaches: their reliance on a fixed token order, which imposes a restrictive inductive bias for image understanding. We observe that single-order predictions rely more on partial discriminative cues, while averaging over multiple token orders provides a more comprehensive signal. Based on this insight, we leverage recent any-order AR models to estimate order-marginalized predictions, unlocking the high classification potential of AR models. Our approach consistently outperforms diffusion-based classifiers across diverse image classification benchmarks, while being up to 25x more efficient. Compared to state-of-the-art self-supervised discriminative models, our method delivers competitive classification performance - a notable achievement for generative classifiers.

Ilia Sudakov, Artem Babenko, Dmitry Baranchuk

1HSE University · 2Yandex Research

Visual Autoregressive ModelsImage ClassificationAutoregressive Modeling
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Mar 19, 2026

HAViT: Historical Attention Vision Transformer

Vision Transformers have excelled in computer vision but their attention mechanisms operate independently across layers, limiting information flow and feature learning. We propose an effective cross-layer attention propagation method that preserves and integrates historical attention matrices across encoder layers, offering a principled refinement of inter-layer information flow in Vision Transformers. This approach enables progressive refinement of attention patterns throughout the transformer hierarchy, enhancing feature acquisition and optimization dynamics. The method requires minimal architectural changes, adding only attention matrix storage and blending operations. Comprehensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements, with ViT performance increasing from 75.74% to 77.07% on CIFAR-100 (+1.33%) and from 57.82% to 59.07% on TinyImageNet (+1.25%). Cross-architecture validation shows similar gains across transformer variants, with CaiT showing 1.01% enhancement. Systematic analysis identifies the blending hyperparameter of historical attention (alpha = 0.45) as optimal across all configurations, providing the ideal balance between current and historical attention information. Random initialization consistently outperforms zero initialization, indicating that diverse initial attention patterns accelerate convergence and improve final performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/banik-s/HAViT.

Swarnendu Banik, Manish Das, Shiv Ram Dubey +1

Computer Vision and Biometrics Lab, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad

Cross-Layer AttentionVision TransformerTransformer AttentionAttention MechanismsImage Classification
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Mar 18, 2026

FMMC: Harnessing the Power of Foundation Models for Accurate Material Classification

Material classification has emerged as a critical task in computer vision and graphics, supporting the assignment of accurate material properties to a wide range of digital and real-world applications. While traditionally framed as an image classification task, this domain faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of annotated data, limiting the accuracy and generalizability of trained models. Recent advances in vision-language foundation models (VLMs) offer promising avenues to address these issues, yet existing solutions leveraging these models still exhibit unsatisfying results in material recognition tasks. In this work, we propose a novel framework that effectively harnesses foundation models to overcome data limitations and enhance classification accuracy. Our method integrates two key innovations: (a) a robust image generation and auto-labeling pipeline that creates a diverse and high-quality training dataset with material-centric images, and automatically assigns labels by fusing object semantics and material attributes in text prompts; (b) a prior incorporation strategy to distill information from VLMs, combined with a joint fine-tuning method that optimizes a pre-trained vision foundation model alongside VLM-derived priors, preserving broad generalizability while adapting to material-specific features. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements on multiple datasets. We show that our synthetic dataset effectively captures the characteristics of real world materials, and the integration of priors from vision-language models significantly enhances the final performance. The source code and dataset will be released.

Qingran Lin, Fengwei Yang, Chaolun Zhu

Georgia Institute of Technology · Duke University · Waseda University

Vision-Language ModelsSynthetic Data GenerationVision Foundation Model AdaptationImage Classification
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Mar 17, 2026

Accurate Shift Invariant Convolutional Neural Networks Using Gaussian-Hermite Moments

The convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are not inherently shift invariant or equivariant. The downsampling operation, used in CNNs, is one of the key reasons which breaks the shift invariant property of a CNN. Conversely, downsampling operation is important to improve computational efficiency and increase the area of the receptive field for more contextual information. In this work, we propose Gaussian-Hermite Sampling (GHS), a novel downsampling strategy designed to achieve accurate shift invariance. GHS leverages Gaussian-Hermite polynomials to perform shift-consistent sampling, enabling CNN layers to maintain invariance to arbitrary spatial shifts prior to training. When integrated into standard CNN architectures, the proposed method embeds shift invariance directly at the layer level without requiring architectural modifications or additional training procedures. We evaluate the proposed approach on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNIST-rot datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that GHS significantly improves shift consistency, achieving 100% classification consistency under spatial shifts, while also improving classification accuracy compared to baseline CNN models.

Jaspreet Singh, Petra Bosilj, Grzegorz Cielniak

Convolutional Neural NetworksEquivariant Neural NetworksImage Classification
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Mar 17, 2026

Hybrid Classical-Quantum Transfer Learning with Noisy Quantum Circuits

Quantum transfer learning combines pretrained classical deep learning models with quantum circuits to reuse expressive feature representations while limiting the number of trainable parameters. In this work, we introduce a family of compact quantum transfer learning architectures that attach variational quantum classifiers to frozen convolutional backbones for image classification. We instantiate and evaluate several classical-quantum hybrid models implemented in PennyLane and Qiskit, and systematically compare them with a classical transfer-learning baseline across heterogeneous image datasets. To ensure a realistic assessment, we evaluate all approaches under both ideal simulation and noisy emulation using noise models calibrated from IBM quantum hardware specifications, as well as on real IBM quantum hardware. Experimental results show that the proposed quantum transfer learning architectures achieve competitive and, in several cases, superior accuracy while consistently reducing training time and energy consumption relative to the classical baseline. Among the evaluated approaches, PennyLane-based implementations provide the most favorable trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency, suggesting that hybrid quantum transfer learning can offer practical benefits in realistic NISQ era settings when feature extraction remains classical.

D. Martín-Pérez, F. Rodríguez-Díaz, D. Gutiérrez-Avilés +2

Data Science and Big Data Lab, Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain · Department of Computer Science, University of Seville, Seville, Spain

Quantum Machine LearningHybrid Quantum-Classical MLImage ClassificationVariational Quantum Circuits
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Mar 17, 2026

Automated identification of Ichneumonoidea wasps via YOLO-based deep learning: Integrating HiresCam for Explainable AI

Accurate taxonomic identification of parasitoid wasps within the superfamily Ichneumonoidea is essential for biodiversity assessment, ecological monitoring, and biological control programs. However, morphological similarity, small body size, and fine-grained interspecific variation make manual identification labor-intensive and expertise-dependent. This study proposes a deep learning-based framework for the automated identification of Ichneumonoidea wasps using a YOLO-based architecture integrated with High-Resolution Class Activation Mapping (HiResCAM) to enhance interpretability. The proposed system simultaneously identifies wasp families from high-resolution images. The dataset comprises 3556 high-resolution images of Hymenoptera specimens. The taxonomic distribution is primarily concentrated among the families Ichneumonidae (n = 786), Braconidae (n = 648), Apidae (n = 466), and Vespidae (n = 460). Extensive experiments were conducted using a curated dataset, with model performance evaluated through precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy. The results demonstrate high accuracy of over 96 % and robust generalization across morphological variations. HiResCAM visualizations confirm that the model focuses on taxonomically relevant anatomical regions, such as wing venation, antennae segmentation, and metasomal structures, thereby validating the biological plausibility of the learned features. The integration of explainable AI techniques improves transparency and trustworthiness, making the system suitable for entomological research to accelerate biodiversity characterization in an under-described parasitoid superfamily.

Joao Manoel Herrera Pinheiro, Gabriela Do Nascimento Herrera, Alvaro Doria Dos Santos +7

São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo, São Carlos 13566590, SP, Brazil · Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos 13565905, Brazil · Federal University of Tocantins, Porto Nacional, 77500000, Brazil +2

Biodiversity MonitoringImage Classification
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Mar 17, 2026

When Generative Augmentation Hurts: A Benchmark Study of GAN and Diffusion Models for Bias Correction in AI Classification Systems

Generative models are widely used to compensate for class imbalance in AI training pipelines, yet their failure modes under low-data conditions are poorly understood. This paper reports a controlled benchmark comparing three augmentation strategies applied to a fine-grained animal classification task: traditional transforms, FastGAN, and Stable Diffusion 1.5 fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Using the Oxford-IIIT Pet Dataset with eight artificially underrepresented breeds, we find that FastGAN augmentation does not merely underperform at very low training set sizes but actively increases classifier bias, with a statistically significant large effect across three random seeds (bias gap increase: +20.7%, Cohen's d = +5.03, p = 0.013). The effect size here is large enough to give confidence in the direction of the finding despite the small number of seeds. Feature embedding analysis using t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding reveals that FastGAN images for severe-minority breeds form tight isolated clusters outside the real image distribution, a pattern consistent with mode collapse. Stable Diffusion with Low-Rank Adaptation produced the best results overall, achieving the highest macro F1 (0.9125 plus or minus 0.0047) and a 13.1% reduction in the bias gap relative to the unaugmented baseline. The data suggest a sample-size boundary somewhere between 20 and 50 training images per class below which GAN augmentation becomes harmful in this setting, though further work across additional domains is needed to establish where that boundary sits more precisely. All experiments run on a consumer-grade GPU with 6 to 8 GB of memory, with no cloud compute required.

Shesh Narayan Gupta, Nik Bear Brown

College of Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA

Synthetic Data AugmentationClass-Imbalanced LearningGenerative Adversarial NetworksImage ClassificationDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Mar 15, 2026

ZOTTA: Test-Time Adaptation with Gradient-Free Zeroth-Order Optimization

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to improve model robustness under distribution shifts by adapting to unlabeled test data, but most existing methods rely on backpropagation (BP), which is computationally costly and incompatible with non-differentiable models such as quantized models, limiting practical deployment on numerous edge devices. Recent BP-free approaches alleviate overhead but remain either architecture-specific or limited in optimization capacity to handle high-dimensional models. We propose ZOTTA, a fully BP-free TTA framework that performs efficient adaptation using only forward passes via Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO). While ZOO is theoretically appealing, naive application leads to slow convergence under high-dimensional parameter spaces and unstable optimization due to the lack of labels. ZOTTA overcomes these challenges through 1) Distribution-Robust Layer Selection, which automatically identifies and freezes layers that already extract distribution-invariant features, updating only domain-sensitive layers to reduce the optimization dimensionality and accelerate convergence; 2) Spatial Feature Aggregation Alignment, which stabilizes ZOO by aligning globally aggregated spatial features between source and target to reduce gradient variance. Together, these components enable architecture-agnostic and stable BP-free adaptation. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-C/R/Sketch/A show that ZOTTA outperforms or matches BP-based methods, e.g., it reduces memory usage by 84% and improves accuracy by 3.9% over SAR on ImageNet-C. Code:https://github.com/Zhang-Ronghao/zotta.

Ronghao Zhang, Shuaicheng Niu, Qi Deng +3

South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510000, China. · Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore. · Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China. +1

Test-Time AdaptationZeroth-Order OptimizationImage Classification
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