# EVIL: Evidential Inference Learning for Trustworthy Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08988 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08988/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07034/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [Interpolation Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03825/) (2019)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Image Segmentation with Self-correcting Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07073/) (2018)
- [TBraTS: Trusted Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09309/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Dcl-Net: Dual Contrastive Learning Network for Semi-Supervised Multi-Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03512/) (2024)
- [MambaEviScrib: Mamba and Evidence-Guided Consistency Enhance CNN Robustness for Scribble-Based Weakly Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19370/) (2024)
- [Mutual Evidential Deep Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12418/) (2025)
- [Co-Evidential Fusion with Information Volume for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02492/) (2025)
- [UGPL: Uncertainty-Guided Progressive Learning for Evidence-Based Classification in Computed Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14102/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Extreme Point Tracing for Weakly Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15666/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, uncertainty-aware methods have attracted increasing attention in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. However, current methods usually suffer from the drawback that it is difficult to balance the computational cost, estimation accuracy, and theoretical support in a unified framework. To alleviate this problem, we introduce the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence (DST) into semi-supervised medical image segmentation, dubbed Evidential Inference Learning (EVIL). EVIL provides a theoretically guaranteed solution to infer accurate uncertainty quantification in a single forward pass. Trustworthy pseudo labels on unlabeled data are generated after uncertainty estimation. The recently proposed consistency regularization-based training paradigm is adopted in our framework, which enforces the consistency on the perturbed predictions to enhance the generalization with few labeled data. Experimental results show that EVIL achieves competitive performance in comparison with several state-of-the-art methods on the public dataset.