Dual-level Fuzzy Learning with Patch Guidance for Image Ordinal Regression

Dong, Chunlai; Ying, Haochao; Qiu, Qibo; Wang, Jinhong; Chen, Danny; Wu, Jian

doi:10.24963/ijcai.2025/103

Dual-level Fuzzy Learning with Patch Guidance for Image Ordinal Regression

Chunlai Dong, Haochao Ying, Qibo Qiu, Jinhong Wang, Danny Chen, Jian Wu

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 918-926.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/103

Keywords

Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Health and medicine
Computer Vision: CV: Recognition (object detection, categorization)

Abstract

Ordinal regression bridges regression and classification by assigning objects to ordered classes. While human experts rely on discriminative patch-level features for decisions, current approaches are limited by the availability of only image-level ordinal labels, overlooking fine-grained patch-level characteristics. In this paper, we propose a Dual-level Fuzzy Learning with Patch Guidance framework, named DFPG that learns precise feature-based grading boundaries from ambiguous ordinal labels, with patch-level supervision. Specifically, we propose patch-labeling and filtering strategies to enable the model to focus on patch-level features exclusively with only image-level ordinal labels available. We further design a dual-level fuzzy learning module, which leverages fuzzy logic to quantitatively capture and handle label ambiguity from both patch-wise and channel-wise perspectives. Extensive experiments on various image ordinal regression datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, further confirming its ability in distinguishing samples from difficult-to-classify categories. The code is available at https://github.com/ZJUMAI/DFPG-ord.

Chunlai Dong, Haochao Ying, Qibo Qiu, Jinhong Wang, Danny Chen, and Jian Wu. 2025. Dual-level Fuzzy Learning with Patch Guidance for Image Ordinal Regression. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25. IJCAI, 918–926. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/103

@inproceedings{ijcai2025p103,
  title     = {Dual-level Fuzzy Learning with Patch Guidance for Image Ordinal Regression},
  author    = {Dong, Chunlai and Ying, Haochao and Qiu, Qibo and Wang, Jinhong and Chen, Danny and Wu, Jian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-25}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization},
  editor    = {James Kwok},
  pages     = {918--926},
  year      = {2025},
  month     = {8},
  note      = {Main Track},
  doi       = {10.24963/ijcai.2025/103},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/103},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Dual-level Fuzzy Learning with Patch Guidance for Image Ordinal Regression
AU  - Dong, Chunlai
AU  - Ying, Haochao
AU  - Qiu, Qibo
AU  - Wang, Jinhong
AU  - Chen, Danny
AU  - Wu, Jian
T2  - Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
PY  - 2025
SP  - 918
EP  - 926
DO  - 10.24963/ijcai.2025/103
UR  - https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/103
ER  -