Prototype-Based Learning

Continual web personalization is essential for engagement, yet real-world non-stationarity and privacy constraints make it hard to adapt quickly without forgetting long-term preferences. We target this gap by seeking a privacy-conscious, parameter-efficient interface that controls stability-plasticity at the user/session level while tying user memory to a shared semantic prior. We propose ProtoFed-SP, a prompt-based framework that injects dual-timescale soft prompts into a frozen backbone: a fast, sparse short-term prompt tracks session intent, while a slow long-term prompt is anchored to a small server-side prototype library that is continually refreshed via differentially private federated aggregation. Queries are routed to Top-M prototypes to compose a personalized prompt. Across eight benchmarks, ProtoFed-SP improves NDCG@10 by +2.9% and HR@10 by +2.0% over the strongest baselines, with notable gains on Amazon-Books (+5.0% NDCG vs. INFER), H&M (+2.5% vs. Dual-LoRA), and Taobao (+2.2% vs. FedRAP). It also lowers forgetting (AF) and Steps-to-95% and preserves accuracy under practical DP budgets. Our contribution is a unifying, privacy-aware prompting interface with prototype anchoring that delivers robust continual personalization and offers a transparent, controllable mechanism to balance stability and plasticity in deployment.

Vision-language models like CLIP are trained with the objective of aligning text and image pairs. Beyond text prompts alone, recent works show that exploiting few-shot image embeddings from a training set is effective for CLIP-based classification. In this work, we analyze mixing image and text prototypes from a bias-variance perspective and show that mixing prototypes acts like a variance shrinkage estimator. Naively mixing text and image prototypes combines two partially aligned spaces since the two modalities are not perfectly aligned. To address this, we project image prototypes onto the principal directions of the semantic text embedding space to obtain a task-semantic image subspace. Mixing the image prototypes with text embeddings in the task-semantic subspace improves few-shot classification. However, when the task-semantic subspace captures insufficient discriminative visual information, relying on this subspace alone can be suboptimal. On extensive experiments over several few-shot classification benchmarks, we show that combining a task-semantic mixed prototype classifier and an anisotropic image-specific classifier systematically outperforms existing methods.

This work presents a multi-label temporal event detection framework for video capsule endoscopy (VCE) that addresses the extreme class imbalance inherent in the Galar dataset by combining two principal contributions: an Angular Separation Loss on class prototypes and a Biological State Machine temporal decoder. The backbone remains BiomedCLIP, a biomedical vision-language foundation model. Three consecutive frames are fused through a Local Differencing Attention module that amplifies transient pathological signals by suppressing static temporal redundancy. An Anatomy Context Head then conditions pathological predictions on soft anatomical activations, exploiting the known spatial co-occurrence structure of GI findings. Learnable text-feature prompts and prototype-based logit augmentation are trained alongside an Angular Separation Loss that penalizes off-diagonal cosine similarity between class prototypes, preventing the prototype collapse that afflicts rare classes under extreme imbalance. To counteract the skewed label distribution, the training regime combines asymmetric focal loss, inverse-frequency weighted sampling, temporal Mixup, Exponential Moving Average, and per-class threshold calibration. The Biological State Machine decoder replaces naive gap merging with a physiologically grounded forward-only state transition over anatomy labels, eliminating the fragmentation artefact that produced hundreds of spurious anatomy events per video in the prior approach and reducing per-video anatomy output to 2--3 clinically realistic events. On the held-out RARE-VISION test set comprising three NaviCam examinations (161,025 frames), the updated pipeline achieves an overall temporal [email protected] of 0.3597 and [email protected] of 0.3399, representing a relative improvement of 46% and 44% respectively over the prior submission, with total inference completed in approximately 21 minutes on a single GPU.

For reliable deployment of deep-learning systems, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is indispensable. In the real world, where test-time inputs often arrive as streaming mixtures of in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples under evolving covariate shifts, OOD samples are domain-constrained and bounded by the environment, and both ID and OOD are jointly affected by the same covariate factors. Existing methods typically assume a stationary ID distribution, but this assumption breaks down in such settings, leading to severe performance degradation. We empirically discover that, even under covariate shift, covariate-shifted ID (csID) and OOD (csOOD) samples remain separable along a discriminative axis in feature space. Building on this observation, we propose DART, a test-time, online OOD detection method that dynamically tracks dual prototypes -- one for ID and the other for OOD -- to recover the drifting discriminative axis, augmented with multi-layer fusion and flip correction for robustness. Extensive experiments on a wide range of challenging benchmarks, where all datasets are subjected to 15 common corruption types at severity level 5, demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance, yielding 15.32 percentage points (pp) AUROC gain and 49.15 pp FPR@95TPR reduction on ImageNet-C vs. Textures-C compared to established baselines. These results highlight the potential of the test-time discriminative axis tracking for dependable OOD detection in dynamically changing environments.

Structured radiology reporting promises faster, more consistent communication than free text, but automation remains difficult as models must make many fine-grained, discrete decisions about rare findings and attributes from limited structured supervision. In contrast, free-text reports are produced at scale in routine care and implicitly encode fine-grained, image-linked information through detailed descriptions. To leverage this unstructured knowledge, we propose ProtoSR, an approach for injecting free-text information into structured report population. First, we introduce an automatic extraction pipeline that uses an instruction-tuned LLM to mine 80k+ MIMIC-CXR studies and build a multimodal knowledge base aligned with a structured reporting template, representing each answer option with a visual prototype. Using this knowledge base, ProtoSR is trained to retrieve prototypes relevant for the current image-question pair and augment the model predictions through a prototype-conditioned residual, providing a data-driven second opinion that selectively corrects predictions. On the Rad-ReStruct benchmark, ProtoSR achieves state-of-the-art results, with the largest improvements on detailed attribute questions, demonstrating the value of integrating free-text derived signal for fine-grained image understanding.

Efficient adaptation between Egocentric (Ego) and Exocentric (Exo) views is crucial for applications such as human-robot cooperation. However, the success of most existing Ego-Exo adaptation methods relies heavily on target-view data for training, thereby increasing computational and data collection costs. In this paper, we make the first exploration of a Test-time Ego-Exo Adaptation for Action Anticipation (TE$^{2}$A$^{3}$) task, which aims to adjust the source-view-trained model online during test time to anticipate target-view actions. It is challenging for existing Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods to address this task due to the multi-action candidates and significant temporal-spatial inter-view gap. Hence, we propose a novel Dual-Clue enhanced Prototype Growing Network (DCPGN), which accumulates multi-label knowledge and integrates cross-modality clues for effective test-time Ego-Exo adaptation and action anticipation. Specifically, we propose a Multi-Label Prototype Growing Module (ML-PGM) to balance multiple positive classes via multi-label assignment and confidence-based reweighting for class-wise memory banks, which are updated by an entropy priority queue strategy. Then, the Dual-Clue Consistency Module (DCCM) introduces a lightweight narrator to generate textual clues indicating action progressions, which complement the visual clues containing various objects. Moreover, we constrain the inferred textual and visual logits to construct dual-clue consistency for temporally and spatially bridging Ego and Exo views. Extensive experiments on the newly proposed EgoMe-anti and the existing EgoExoLearn benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms related state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhaofengSHI/DCPGN.

The ability to interpret machine learning model decisions is critical in such domains as healthcare, where trust in model predictions is as important as their accuracy. Inspired by the development of prototype parts-based deep neural networks in computer vision, we propose a new model for tabular data, specifically tailored to medical records, that requires discretization of diagnostic result norms. Unlike the original vision models that rely on the spatial structure, our method employs trainable patching over features describing a patient, to learn meaningful prototypical parts from structured data. These parts are represented as binary or discretized feature subsets. This allows the model to express prototypes in human-readable terms, enabling alignment with clinical language and case-based reasoning. Our proposed neural network is inherently interpretable and offers interpretable concept-based predictions by comparing the patient's description to learned prototypes in the latent space of the network. In experiments, we demonstrate that the model achieves classification performance competitive to widely used baseline models on medical benchmark datasets, while also offering transparency, bridging the gap between predictive performance and interpretability in clinical decision support.

Vision language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization across diverse tasks, yet their performance remains constrained by the quality and geometry of the textual prototypes used to represent classes. Standard zero shot classifiers, derived from frozen text encoders and handcrafted prompts, may yield correlated or weakly separated embeddings that limit task specific discriminability. We introduce ORION, a text encoder fine tuning framework that improves pretrained VLMs using only class names. Our method optimizes, via low rank adaptation, a novel loss integrating two terms, one promoting pairwise orthogonality between the textual representations of the classes of a given task and the other penalizing deviations from the initial class prototypes. Furthermore, we provide a probabilistic interpretation of our orthogonality penalty, connecting it to the general maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) principle via Huygens theorem. We report extensive experiments on 11 benchmarks and three large VLM backbones, showing that the refined textual embeddings yield powerful replacements for the standard CLIP prototypes. Added as plug and play module on top of various state of the art methods, and across different prediction settings (zero shot, few shot and test time adaptation), ORION improves the performance consistently and significantly.

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (EFMs) have shown strong potential for transferable representation learning, yet their adaptation in realistic settings remains challenging when only a few labeled subjects are available. We show that this challenge stems from a structural mismatch between noisy, limited supervision and the highly plastic parameter space of EFMs, reflected in three key failure modes: overconfident miscalibration, prediction collapse, and representation drift caused by unconstrained parameter updates. To address these challenges, we propose SCOPE, a Structured COnfidence-aware Prototype-guided framework for label-limited EFM adaptation. SCOPE first constructs cohort-level external supervision to provide persistent guidance and further derives confidence-aware pseudo-labels to select reliable unlabeled samples for adaptation. Building on the constructed external supervision, SCOPE introduces ProAdapter, a lightweight prototype-conditioned adapter that modulates frozen EFMs to preserve pretrained representations. Experiments across 50 label-limited adaptation settings, covering 6 EEG tasks, 5 EFM backbones, and 5%-50% training labeled-subject ratios, show that SCOPE consistently achieves strong performance and efficiency.