MedTokenBudget: Lesion-Preserving Token Routing for Dermoscopic Image Classification
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.30613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dermoscopy classifiers built on Vision Transformers process all image patches uniformly, although diagnostic evidence is concentrated in the lesion region. Existing token pruning methods reduce tokens using generic saliency or similarity signals, but rarely ask whether the retained subset still contains the lesion. This paper introduces MedTokenBudget, a supervised post-backbone token routing framework that learns to construct compact lesion-enriched representations when auxiliary lesion masks are available. Its Lesion-Aware Token Scoring (LATS
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.30613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dermoscopy classifiers built on Vision Transformers process all image patches uniformly, although diagnostic evidence is concentrated in the lesion region.
- Existing token pruning methods reduce tokens using generic saliency or similarity signals, but rarely ask whether the retained subset still contains the lesion.
- This paper introduces MedTokenBudget, a supervised post-backbone token routing framework that learns to construct compact lesion-enriched representations when auxiliary lesion masks are available.
Why it matters
The value of this work lies as much in how it was tested as in the claim itself. Sample design, baselines, uncertainty and replication help separate a laboratory result from real-world impact.
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