Because dense frame-level annotation of colonoscopy videos is costly, we propose WSPolypNet, a weakly supervised framework for polyp localization using only video-level labels. WSPolypNet employs a 3D convolutional neural network trained with video-level supervision to generate class activation maps (CAMs), which identify candidate polyp regions without requiring frame-level spatial annotations. The CAM-derived localization cues are further enhanced using a multi-view strategy and provided to MedSAM2 as point prompts. MedSAM2 then propagates segmentation masks across the video, refining the coarse localization cues according to polyp boundaries. WSPolypNet achieved CorLoc scores of 47.80%, 43.68%, and 35.01% at IoU thresholds of 0.3, 0.5, and 0.7, respectively, compared with 36.87%, 33.72%, and 27.94% in the single-view setting. For small polyps, the multi-view strategy improved CorLoc@0.5 from 16.01% to 30.97%. The framework also achieved a recall of 94.51%. These results demonstrate the potential of weakly supervised spatiotemporal learning to substantially reduce spatial annotation requirements for polyp localization in colonoscopy videos.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08182
How can vision-language models help video anomaly detection (VAD) when surveillance data remain distributed, weakly labeled, and resource-constrained? Most weakly supervised VAD methods assume centralized training; recent VLM-based extensions further rely on dense inference, generated explanations, or additional adaptation. We introduce a lightweight federated MIL-VLM cascade in which only a compact MIL scorer is trained across clients, while a frozen VLM verifies high-scoring suspect segments post hoc. We study two VLM feedback interfaces: parsed text-generation decisions and a logit-based interface that extracts a continuous anomaly score from next-token Yes/No probabilities. Experiments on UCF-Crime with InternVL3.5-2B and Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct show that text-generation verification can improve frame-level AUC after diagnostic temporal post-processing, but remains sensitive to prompts, parsers, model choice, and smoothing. In contrast, the logit interface provides a fixed parser-free signal that improves both frame-level AUC and frame-level AP over the MIL baseline across both VLMs, without temporal post-processing in its main configuration. Since suspect segments are updated independently once available, next-token logit feedback provides a simple segment-local alternative to text-generation verification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07455
Segmentation of complex structures in X-ray tomographic data is a fundamental task in biomedical research, but it often requires large amounts of precisely annotated data, making fully supervised approaches costly and difficult to scale. In this study, weakly supervised deep learning is investigated as a strategy to reduce annotation effort while maintaining accurate segmentation. A two-dimensional convolutional neural network based on the nnU-Net framework was adapted to a weak supervision setting using sparse dot-based annotations, complemented by a limited number of fully segmented images. The approach was evaluated on high-resolution microCT slices of rat kidneys, targeting the segmentation of renal glomeruli, which are small, low-contrast anatomical structures. Results indicate that weak supervision provides a meaningful learning signal, enabling reliable localization of glomeruli even in the absence of dense labels. Incorporating a small set of high-quality annotations substantially improves segmentation performance, approaching that of a fully supervised model. These findings highlight the potential of weakly supervised learning as an annotation-efficient strategy for the analysis of complex structures in X-ray tomographic data, and suggest that alternative loss formulations tailored to sparse annotations may further enhance performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07313
As the scale of video surveillance data outpaces manual annotation capacities, weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) has emerged as a critical research frontier. Most existing approaches formulate WSVAD within a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework that relies on rigid, hand-crafted temporal priors to supervise anomaly scoring. However, such formulations exhibit limited adaptability to the wide variation in anomaly durations and temporal dynamics observed in real-world videos, often leading to unstable or unreliable snippet-level predictions. To address this limitation, we propose an adaptive temporal modeling framework for WSVAD that explicitly accounts for variations in video dynamics across multiple temporal granularities. First, we introduce a Temporal Refinement Module (TRM) that leverages dynamic positional encoding and a learnable class token to model long-range temporal dependencies while distilling a stable global video-level representation. Second, to capture anomalous events with varying frequency and duration, we develop an adaptive Event Segmentation Module (ESM) that identifies event boundaries through temporal discontinuity analysis and aggregates snippet features into discriminative event-level representations. Finally, for snippet-level and event-level predictions, we propose an adaptive similarity-based fusion strategy that dynamically integrates anomaly scores into video-level predictions, replacing fixed top-k aggregation heuristics with global semantic relevance. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05066
Species identification in camera trap images has been widely studied, but key ecological modeling tasks such as species abundance or density estimation also require counting individual animals. However, the lack of counting labels in most datasets and low frame rates (typically ~1 frame per second) make sequence-level tracking and count estimation particularly challenging. In this work, we present PuTR-CouT, a counting-by-tracking framework built on a transformer-based learned association mechanism for sequence-level animal counting in camera trap images. To address the scarcity of annotated tracking data, we generate synthetic training data by exploiting structural priors, such as static backgrounds and short temporal bursts, to heuristically create pseudo-tracking labels in a weakly supervised manner. The resulting tracker associates detections across frames, using these tracks to estimate per-species counts. We also refine the MaxBoxCount heuristic used by the top solutions of the iWildCam 2021 challenge as a strong baseline, setting the highest score reported to date. When evaluated on the iWildCam 2021 benchmark, our framework PuTR-CouT delivers competitive counting results compared to the improved MaxBoxCount, with the added capability of multi-species predictions and track-level verification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05038
Weakly supervised 3D occupancy prediction reduces the reliance on costly 3D annotations by learning from 2D pseudo-labels generated by vision foundation models. However, existing methods typically use these imperfect pseudo-labels directly as supervision, making occupancy learning vulnerable to erroneous geometric and semantic targets. We observe that agreement across repeated observations provides an inexpensive and reliable cue for assessing pseudo-label reliability. Based on this observation, we propose \textbf{LetOccVote}, a weakly supervised Gaussian-based occupancy framework that leverages cross-frame voting to improve both geometric and semantic supervision. For geometry, Depth Vote exploits cross-frame geometric agreement to refine supported pseudo depth and reject contradictory estimates before volumetric lifting and depth supervision. For semantics, Semantic Vote aggregates pseudo-semantic observations in a shared 3D space to identify reliable and contested evidence, strengthening reliable semantic supervision while filtering unreliable pseudo-label segments. The entire framework is trained solely with 2D pseudo-label supervision without requiring 3D occupancy annotations. On Occ3D-nuScenes, LetOccVote achieves 53.27 IoU and 20.39 mIoU, establishing state-of-the-art performance among methods with 2D pseudo-label supervision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04846
Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos that contain moments relevant to a text query. Since the target moment occupies only a portion of the video, PRVR requires retrieval based on fine-grained understanding beyond coarse video-level matching. However, existing methods often rely on frozen CLIP frame features, which lack temporal understanding. Even with recent progress in parameter-efficient CLIP adaptation, video-level predictions can still be supported by imprecise frame-level evidence. In this paper, we propose an Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation (ITA) framework for PRVR. First, our Backbone-Internal Temporal Adaptation allows the last few visual transformer layers to attend over groups of neighboring frames. This provides temporally aware frame embeddings while keeping CLIP frozen and training only adaptation parameters. Second, we introduce Affinity-Weighted Gradient Propagation to address the weakly supervised nature of PRVR, softly aggregating top-$k$ frames based on text-frame affinities and propagating learning signals to multiple query-relevant frames. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on PRVR benchmarks, demonstrates robust cross-dataset transfer, and retrieves substantially more accurate frame-level evidence within ground-truth query-relevant moments. Our code is available at this http URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04800
Sampling error yields exclusively reactive, non-lesional brain parenchyma in a significant proportion of intracranial biopsies, leaving the underlying disease undiagnosed. We benchmark four pathology foundation models (UNI2-h, Virchow2, Prov-GigaPath, H-optimus-0) as frozen patch encoders within a shared attention-based multiple-instance learning framework using 245 whole-slide images from 186 patients with confirmed downstream diagnoses. We first show that coarse disease-category prediction can be reproduced largely from slide size alone. After restricting classification to three finer diagnostic distinctions within common tissue categories, this confound no longer explains performance, yet disease labels remain predictable above chance under permutation testing (p $\le 10^{-4}$ throughout). Surprisingly, performance is statistically indistinguishable across all foundation-model encoders, suggesting that recovering these weak morphological signatures is not limited by current patch representations. Signed instance-contribution maps and expert review further test whether predictive evidence localizes to reactive parenchyma rather than sampling-induced bias like blood introduced during tissue sampling. These results position acquisition-shortcut auditing via a provenance-only baseline as a necessary control in computational-pathology benchmarks, and show, once that confound is removed, that weakly supervised models still recover disease signal from tissue conventionally regarded as non-diagnostic.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02390
Point-supervised change detection (PS-CD) aims to identify pixel-level changes between bi-temporal images using only sparsely annotated points. Although point annotations substantially reduce labeling costs, their limited spatial coverage often results in incomplete and noisy pseudo-labels. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage framework that introduces SAM2 priors into PS-CD and progressively adapts them to the target task. In Stage I, SAM2 generates object-aware candidate masks from point annotations on the bi-temporal images, and a bi-temporal mask selection strategy is designed to convert generic segmentation responses into more reliable change pseudo-labels. Subsequently, a lightweight CNN refinement module with an uncertainty-aware loss is employed to improve boundary quality and local structural consistency. In Stage II, we construct a teacher-student self-training framework in which the teacher is updated by exponential moving average and periodically refreshes the pseudo-labels. This design establishes a closed-loop optimization process that alternates between pseudo-label refinement and model re-optimization. Experiments on three benchmark datasets, including WHU-CD, LEVIR-CD, and SYSU-CD, demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous weakly supervised approaches on most benchmarks and remains competitive with several fully supervised methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02171
In semiconductor manufacturing, defect analysis is essential, but manual inspection cannot scale. However, existing automated inspection methods remain insufficient for root-cause analysis and process optimization. To this end, we present SePArate, a weakly supervised wafer defect segmentation method. SePArate enables pixel-level separation of patterns by leveraging only image-level annotations. It consists of a three-phase training: encoder pretraining, knowledge transfer to learn spatial cues, and training on synthetic mixed-defect data for accurate segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that SePArate outperforms the baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30410
Automated radiological report generation can alleviate clinical workloads and eliminate observer variability. However, standard free-text generation models pose hallucination risks in dense regions and fail under data scarcity. We address these challenges in Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) from contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) imaging. To enforce factual safety, we reformulate report generation as an anatomically grounded, multi-label, structured reporting task, predicting localized tumor involvement across a hierarchical clinical schema. To bridge the visual gap from missing metabolic imaging (e.g., PET), we introduce SGRNet (Spatially Guided Radiology Network), incorporating two low-cost spatial priors: automated organ segmentations and weakly supervised tumor localization maps modeled via 3D Gaussian heatmaps. These priors are dynamically integrated via spatial feature modulation to guide the network toward subtle tumor-induced structural alterations. Evaluated on a multi-centric dataset of 184 paired HNC CECT volumes and reports, on five clinically salient, densely packed anatomical subsites, SGRNet achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.60, an 8.8 percentage-point absolute improvement over strong volume-only 3D baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29153
Aesthetics are an important part of the symbolism of artistic works. Although subjective, humans categorize art based on the emotion evoked regardless of modality. What remains under-explored is how AI models form their own aesthetic categorization of human-produced media without explicit labels or cross-modal supervision. We present a self-supervised framework that projects four modalities (text, audio, image and video) into a shared 256-dimensional embedding space and applies iterative clustering to discover aesthetic structure. We discuss the divergence between AI-generated cluster assignments and human affective register labels on a weakly supervised multimodal dataset. This work has applications in understanding how AI structures cross-modal similarity, organizing heterogeneous media collections for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and automated data labeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27121
Perceived risk in driving evolves over time and may be supported by specific scene entities, yet supervision is typically limited to coarse video-level judgments. Learning \emph{when} supporting evidence emerges and \emph{which entities} support a risk predictor would ordinarily require costly temporal- and entity-level annotations. We introduce \textbf{CoRE}, a weakly supervised coarse-to-fine framework that learns fine-grained prediction support from coarse video supervision. CoRE first trains a video-level predictor and then freezes it. Structured interventions over candidate temporal regions or entity tracks measure how each candidate changes the coarse prediction, producing graded prediction-effect targets. These targets are distilled into a student that directly predicts temporal and entity support from the original video, without requiring interventions at inference. We evaluate this learning principle across three complementary settings: RISEE tests perceived-risk support from subjective clip-level judgments without temporal or entity-level risk annotations; DoTA provides independent temporal event annotations for evaluating weakly supervised traffic-anomaly localization; and UCF-Crime tests whether the same coarse-to-fine mechanism extends to a standard non-driving anomaly-detection benchmark. Across these settings, CoRE learns informative fine-grained support from coarse supervision, with strong temporal localization on DoTA and competitive performance on UCF-Crime. These results show that coarse video predictions can provide useful supervision for recovering the fine-grained evidence supporting them, without requiring corresponding fine-grained labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25344
Seagrass meadows are crucial blue-carbon habitats, and mapping their extent is a prerequisite for coastal management and carbon inventory. Optical satellite sensors cover large areas but cannot reach deep or turbid water, whereas side-scan sonar (SSS) images the seabed at high resolution and at any depth. Interpreting SSS, however, still relies on dense manual annotation, which is slow and costly. We address this by adapting a weakly supervised semantic segmentation framework to SSS benthic habitat mapping, so that pixel-level maps are learned from image-level labels alone. The framework couples a ViT-based encoder-decoder with a classification branch, extracts class activation maps, and refines them into pseudo-labels with a dense conditional random field that we tune for the noise and weak boundaries of acoustic imagery. It follows an iterative self-training scheme, together with a sampling strategy to cope with the strong class imbalance of the data. We also study the effect of different loss functions on segmentation quality, finding Lovász-Softmax loss the most effective. On a held-out transect, the refined pseudo-labels reached an mIoU of 89.3\% against the ground truth, and the segmentation branch, trained without any pixel-level labels, reached 87.6\%. Self-supervised pretraining on unlabelled SSS added a further 3\% in mean intersection-over-union. Field trials further demonstrate the generalizability of the trained model. These results show that accurate and label-efficient benthic habitat mapping from side-scan sonar is feasible at the scale needed for coast-wide seagrass monitoring.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24756
Two-stage neuro-symbolic architectures provide an elegant paradigm for visual problem solving by cleanly separating connectionist perception of predefined symbols from possibly later defined relational reasoning thereon. However, anchoring high-level predicates into visual frames typically necessitates annotations that are expensive to acquire. In this work, we introduce the Dynamic Orthogonal Concept Bottleneck (D-OCB), an object-centric slot- VAE framework designed to extract human-aligned symbolic predicates under extremely weak supervision. D-OCB eliminates the arduous manual tuning of loss-balancing coef- ficients by dynamically learning optimal hyperparameter allocations during training. To infuse prior knowledge on independence of concept categories, in addition to standard re- construction self-supervision we penalize correlation across concept subspaces. Crucially, to combat the instability of very low supervision regimes, D-OCB incorporates a dynamic di- mensionality allocation mechanism; this adaptive formulation allows well-represented con- cepts to yield latent dimensions to underperforming concepts that are lagging behind, effectively preventing representation collapse and significantly improving overall concept accuracy. Through an extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our framework achieves high concept alignment and downstream visual reasoning accuracy using minimal label budgets, matching or outperforming end-to-end paradigms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22584
Weakly supervised video anomaly detectors are trained with video-level labels but are commonly evaluated as temporal localizers using Micro-AUROC or AP over pooled test frames. Because these metrics compare frames from different videos, a detector can score well by separating videos without accurately ordering moments within them. We exactly decompose Micro-AUROC by video identity into Within-AUROC for temporal ordering within videos and Cross-AUROC for comparisons across videos. Across ShanghaiTech, XD-Violence, and UCF-Crime, only 0.071-0.388% of comparisons between anomalous and normal frames occur within the same video. When both classes remain distributed across V videos, this share decreases as O(1/V), a benchmark property we call temporal dilution. We train anomaly video binary classifiers under the same video-level supervision and repeat each video score across all frames. These video-constant outputs reach 81.40-97.18 Micro-AUROC despite having no within-video variation. Across 72 controlled runs, replacing every frame score with its video mean preserves a median 98.6% of the Micro-AUROC margin above chance. The same empirical pattern holds for author-released outputs and for XD-Violence under its official AP evaluation. A detector can therefore achieve a high pooled score even when it assigns the same score to every moment within each video.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21854
Trustworthy multimodal fusion in clinical settings requires handling incomplete and heterogeneous modality subsets across institutions, where privacy constraints prohibit centralized data sharing. Federated learning (FL) mitigates data-sharing constraints but suffers from client-specific missing modalities, where institutions possess incomplete multimodal subsets, degrading fusion quality and segmentation performance. While FL and weak supervision have been studied separately, their joint use with image-level labels under heterogeneous missing modalities remains unaddressed. We propose \textbf{MOSAIC}, the first modality-agnostic federated framework for weakly supervised binary tumor segmentation under client-specific missing modalities. We introduce a client-specific modality-alignment module that fuses available channels into a shared latent space without prior knowledge of modality identity, a spectral prototype alignment loss that reconciles cross-client distribution shift using compact non-invertible frequency-domain statistics, and a dedicated federated refinement network that denoises the resulting CAM pseudo-labels into accurate masks, breaking the accuracy ceiling of weak supervision. Experiments on three multi-institutional brain tumor benchmarks (FeTS2022, BraTS-MEN, and BraTS-SSA) demonstrate significant improvements over all image, box, and point-supervised baselines, approaching fully supervised accuracy using only image-level labels and reaching 0.84 Dice on FeTS2022. Dynamic new client addition enables previously unseen institutions to join an already-trained federation within 0.01-0.04 Dice without retraining. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19788
Industrial visual inspection must both decide whether a product is defective and localize the defect, yet pixel-level masks are costly to collect at scale. Most anomaly-segmentation methods learn only from defect-free images and score deviations from normality. A true defect and an unusual-but-normal region, however, can both deviate substantially and receive similarly high scores. We propose Contrastive Dual Gaussian Processes (CDGP), a weakly supervised framework that models normal and anomaly inducing-variable predictive distributions over dense tokens. Its posterior-dominance statistic standardizes their predictive-mean difference by the joint predictive uncertainty, providing both spatial evidence and image-level confidence. This evidence complements hierarchical normal-reconstruction residuals for fine localization. All calibration uses training data only, without human pixel annotations or test-time fitting. Across MVTec AD~2, KSDD2, and VisA, CDGP ranks first among the evaluated methods on all MVTec AD~2 localization metrics and is first-place or competitive on KSDD2 and VisA. Factorized and matched linear-head controls delimit the contribution and scope of the linear-kernel Gaussian process (GP) formulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18614
Removing wearables from physiological monitoring also removes their supervision: the signal indicating where and when a stress response occurred. Contactless stress sensing therefore becomes a weakly supervised evidence-localization problem, where a clip-level label must be traced to the body regions and moments that produced it. We address this with FABLE-Therm, a weakly supervised architecture that preserves localized evidence across body regions, time, and encoder-specific representations until the final decision. FABLE-Therm fuses frozen foundation-model encoders at the embedding level, with theory explaining why localized fusion can outperform feature concatenation and prediction averaging. We study this problem in opioid use disorder (OUD), where stress is a major relapse trigger and sustained wearable use can be difficult during early recovery. Using fixed thermal video, FABLE-Therm achieves 0.938 AUROC on held-out participants, and its learned representation transfers to self-reported craving, providing, to our knowledge, the first evidence that craving can be recovered from contactless thermal video. Localized evidence also enables participant-level analysis of deployment failure. We find that improving representation alone is insufficient for equitable deployment: additional data from the underserved group would recover only about half of the cohort gap, while the remainder reflects person-to-person heterogeneity. This modality-agnostic decomposition applies to models with identifiable subpopulations. Together with the first cohort-structured contactless thermal OUD benchmark, our results show that preserving localized evidence supports both accurate sensing and principled analysis of who a model fails and why.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16087
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is a natural way to adapt pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies, but most adapter designs apply temporally static updates throughout a control rollout, overlooking the phase-dependent nature of continuous-action manipulation. Such policies traverse distinct regimes, including approach, contact transition, grasping, transport, and placement, each requiring different adaptation behaviors. We propose \textbf{PhaseLoRA}, a lightweight LoRA parameterization that conditions adaptation at each action-chunk prediction step using two weakly supervised descriptors: fine-control tendency and event/boundary intensity. PhaseLoRA modulates the LoRA left factor in the action expert, allowing the effective low-rank update direction to vary over time while keeping the backbone largely frozen. On LIBERO, PhaseLoRA improves average success rate by 12.2 points over a matched-parameter high-rank LoRA baseline and outperforms stronger LoRA variants. Ablations show that random temporal modulation and scalar gating do not reproduce the performance of the full model, while update-direction analyses reveal structured temporal variation associated with the predicted control descriptors. These results establish within-trajectory conditioning as an effective lightweight PEFT axis for continuous-action VLA policies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15285