SAFE-KD: Risk-Controlled Early-Exit Distillation for Vision Backbones

Early-exit networks reduce inference cost by allowing ``easy'' inputs to stop early, but practical deployment hinges on knowing \emph{when} early exit is safe. We introduce SAFE-KD, a universal multi-exit wrapper for modern vision backbones that couples hierarchical distillation with \emph{conformal risk control}. SAFE-KD attaches lightweight exit heads at intermediate depths, distills a strong teacher into all exits via Decoupled Knowledge Distillation (DKD), and enforces deep-to-shallow consistency between exits. At inference, we calibrate per-exit stopping thresholds on a held-out set using conformal risk control (CRC) to guarantee a user-specified \emph{selective} misclassification risk (among the samples that exit early) under exchangeability. Across multiple datasets and architectures, SAFE-KD yields improved accuracy compute trade-offs, stronger calibration, and robust performance under corruption while providing finite-sample risk guarantees.

TopoLoRA-SAM: Topology-Aware Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Foundation Segmenters for Thin-Structure and Cross-Domain Binary Semantic Segmentation

Foundation segmentation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibit strong zero-shot generalization through large-scale pretraining, but adapting them to domain-specific semantic segmentation remains challenging, particularly for thin structures (e.g., retinal vessels) and noisy modalities (e.g., SAR imagery). Full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and risks catastrophic forgetting. We propose \textbf{TopoLoRA-SAM}, a topology-aware and parameter-efficient adaptation framework for binary semantic segmentation. TopoLoRA-SAM injects Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) into the frozen ViT encoder, augmented with a lightweight spatial convolutional adapter and optional topology-aware supervision via differentiable clDice. We evaluate our approach on five benchmarks spanning retinal vessel segmentation (DRIVE, STARE, CHASE\_DB1), polyp segmentation (Kvasir-SEG), and SAR sea/land segmentation (SL-SSDD), comparing against U-Net, DeepLabV3+, SegFormer, and Mask2Former. TopoLoRA-SAM achieves the best retina-average Dice and the best overall average Dice across datasets, while training only \textbf{5.2\%} of model parameters ($\sim$4.9M). On the challenging CHASE\_DB1 dataset, our method substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness, demonstrating that topology-aware parameter-efficient adaptation can match or exceed fully fine-tuned specialist models. Code is available at : https://github.com/salimkhazem/Seglab.git

BYO-Eval: Build Your Own Dataset for Fine-Grained Visual Assessment of Multimodal Language Models

Visual Language Models (VLMs) are now sufficiently advanced to support a broad range of applications, including answering complex visual questions, and are increasingly expected to interact with images in varied ways. To evaluate them, current benchmarks often focus on specific domains (e.g., reading charts), constructing datasets of annotated real images paired with pre-defined Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) to report aggregate accuracy scores. However, such benchmarks entail high annotation costs, risk information leakage, and do not clarify whether failures stem from limitations in visual perception, reasoning, or general knowledge. We propose a new evaluation methodology, inspired by ophthalmologic diagnostics, leveraging procedural generation of synthetic images to obtain control over visual attributes and precisely reveal perception failures in VLMs. Specifically, we build collections of images with gradually more challenging variations in the content of interest (e.g., number of objects in a counting task) while holding other visual parameters constant. This diagnostic allows systematic stress testing and fine-grained failure analysis, shifting the focus from coarse benchmarking toward targeted and interpretable assessment of VLM capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/byoeval/BYO-EVAL.

PolygoNet: Leveraging Simplified Polygonal Representation for Effective Image Classification

Deep learning models have achieved significant success in various image related tasks. However, they often encounter challenges related to computational complexity and overfitting. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach that leverages polygonal representations of images using dominant points or contour coordinates. By transforming input images into these compact forms, our method significantly reduces computational requirements, accelerates training, and conserves resources making it suitable for real time and resource constrained applications. These representations inherently capture essential image features while filtering noise, providing a natural regularization effect that mitigates overfitting. The resulting lightweight models achieve performance comparable to state of the art methods using full resolution images while enabling deployment on edge devices. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing complexity, improving generalization, and facilitating edge computing applications. This work demonstrates the potential of polygonal representations in advancing efficient and scalable deep learning solutions for real world scenarios. The code for the experiments of the paper is provided in https://github.com/salimkhazem/PolygoNet.

Improving Knot Prediction in Wood Logs with Longitudinal Feature Propagation

The quality of a wood log in the wood industry depends heavily on the presence of both outer and inner defects, including inner knots that are a result of the growth of tree branches. Today, locating the inner knots require the use of expensive equipment such as X-ray scanners. In this paper, we address the task of predicting the location of inner defects from the outer shape of the logs. The dataset is built by extracting both the contours and the knots with X-ray measurements. We propose to solve this binary segmentation task by leveraging convolutional recurrent neural networks. Once the neural network is trained, inference can be performed from the outer shape measured with cheap devices such as laser profilers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on fir and spruce tree species and perform ablation on the recurrence to demonstrate its importance.

Minimizing subject-dependent calibration for BCI with Riemannian transfer learning

Calibration is still an important issue for user experience in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). Common experimental designs often involve a lengthy training period that raises the cognitive fatigue, before even starting to use the BCI. Reducing or suppressing this subject-dependent calibration is possible by relying on advanced machine learning techniques, such as transfer learning. Building on Riemannian BCI, we present a simple and effective scheme to train a classifier on data recorded from different subjects, to reduce the calibration while preserving good performances. The main novelty of this paper is to propose a unique approach that could be applied on very different paradigms. To demonstrate the robustness of this approach, we conducted a meta-analysis on multiple datasets for three BCI paradigms: event-related potentials (P300), motor imagery and SSVEP. Relying on the MOABB open source framework to ensure the reproducibility of the experiments and the statistical analysis, the results clearly show that the proposed approach could be applied on any kind of BCI paradigm and in most of the cases to significantly improve the classifier reliability. We point out some key features to further improve transfer learning methods.