# Progressive Growing of Patch Size: Resource-Efficient Curriculum Learning for Dense Prediction Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07853/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [Swin UNETR: Swin Transformers for Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumors in MRI Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01266/) (2022)
- [The Medical Segmentation Decathlon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05735/) (2021)
- [Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09848/) (2019)
- [Curriculum Learning by Transfer Learning: Theory and Experiments with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03796/) (2018)
- [Learning to Execute](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.4615/) (2014)
- [HeMIS: Hetero-Modal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.05194/) (2016)
- [Learn like a Pathologist: Curriculum Learning by Annotator Agreement for Histopathology Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13698/) (2020)
- [Medical-based Deep Curriculum Learning for Improved Fracture Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00482/) (2020)
- [Carbon Footprint of Selecting and Training Deep Learning Models for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02202/) (2022)
- [CASED: Curriculum Adaptive Sampling for Extreme Data Imbalance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10819/) (2018)
- [PGU-net+: Progressive Growing of U-net+ for Automated Cervical Nuclei Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01062/) (2019)
- [A New Three-stage Curriculum Learning Approach to Deep Network Based Liver Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07895/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Simulating Dynamic Tumor Contrast Enhancement in Breast MRI using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18872/) (2024)
- [Curriculum-Guided Layer Scaling for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11389/) (2025)
- [Federated nnU-Net for Privacy-Preserving Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02549/) (2025)
- [Progressive Growing of Patch Size: Curriculum Learning for Accelerated and Improved Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23241/) (2025)
- [Progressive Learning with Anatomical Priors for Reliable Left Atrial Scar Segmentation from Late Gadolinium Enhancement MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26186/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we introduce Progressive Growing of Patch Size, a resource-efficient implicit curriculum learning approach for dense prediction tasks. Our curriculum approach is defined by growing the patch size during model training, which gradually increases the task's difficulty. We integrated our curriculum into the nnU-Net framework and evaluated the methodology on all 10 tasks of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon. With our approach, we are able to substantially reduce runtime, computational costs, and CO2 emissions of network training compared to classical constant patch size training. In our experiments, the curriculum approach resulted in improved convergence. We are able to outperform standard nnU-Net training, which is trained with constant patch size, in terms of Dice Score on 7 out of 10 MSD tasks while only spending roughly 50% of the original training runtime. To the best of our knowledge, our Progressive Growing of Patch Size is the first successful employment of a sample-length curriculum in the form of patch size in the field of computer vision. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/compai-lab/2024-miccai-fischer.