# Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields in Efficient CNNs for Fair Medical Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13039 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13039/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03697/) (2021)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)
- [ResMLP: Feedforward networks for image classification with data-efficient training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03404/) (2021)
- [ACNet: Strengthening the Kernel Skeletons for Powerful CNN via Asymmetric Convolution Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03930/) (2019)
- [More ConvNets in the 2020s: Scaling up Kernels Beyond 51x51 using Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03620/) (2022)
- [Run, Don't Walk: Chasing Higher FLOPS for Faster Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03667/) (2023)
- [EdgeViTs: Competing Light-weight CNNs on Mobile Devices with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03436/) (2022)
- [MixConv: Mixed Depthwise Convolutional Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09595/) (2019)
- [Diverse Branch Block: Building a Convolution as an Inception-like Unit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13425/) (2021)
- [Fair Contrastive Learning for Facial Attribute Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16209/) (2022)
- [FairCLIP: Harnessing Fairness in Vision-Language Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19949/) (2024)
- [MEDFAIR: Benchmarking Fairness for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01725/) (2022)
- [Rewrite the Stars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19967/) (2024)
- [FairMedFM: Fairness Benchmarking for Medical Imaging Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00983/) (2024)
- [Balanced-MixUp for Highly Imbalanced Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09850/) (2021)
- [Long-Tailed Classification of Thorax Diseases on Chest X-Ray: A New Benchmark Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13365/) (2022)
- [ProCo: Prototype-aware Contrastive Learning for Long-tailed Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00183/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture design has attracted growing research interests. However, they typically apply single receptive field (RF), small asymmetric RFs, or pyramid RFs to learn different feature representations, still encountering two significant challenges in medical image classification tasks: 1) They have limitations in capturing diverse lesion characteristics efficiently, e.g., tiny, coordination, small and salient, which have unique roles on the classification results, especially imbalanced medical image classification. 2) The predictions generated by those CNNs are often unfair/biased, bringing a high risk when employing them to real-world medical diagnosis conditions. To tackle these issues, we develop a new concept, Expert-Like Reparameterization of Heterogeneous Pyramid Receptive Fields (ERoHPRF), to simultaneously boost medical image classification performance and fairness. This concept aims to mimic the multi-expert consultation mode by applying the well-designed heterogeneous pyramid RF bag to capture lesion characteristics with varying significances effectively via convolution operations with multiple heterogeneous kernel sizes. Additionally, ERoHPRF introduces an expert-like structural reparameterization technique to merge its parameters with the two-stage strategy, ensuring competitive computation cost and inference speed through comparisons to a single RF. To manifest the effectiveness and generalization ability of ERoHPRF, we incorporate it into mainstream efficient CNN architectures. The extensive experiments show that our proposed ERoHPRF maintains a better trade-off than state-of-the-art methods in terms of medical image classification, fairness, and computation overhead. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/XiaoLing12138/Expert-Like-Reparameterization-of-Heterogeneous-Pyramid-Receptive-Fields.