# The Power of Certainty: How Confident Models Lead to Better Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10490 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10490/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Distillation for medical imaging, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 30 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Distillation for medical imaging](https://mlsanity.com/distill/distillation-for-medical-imaging/)

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Kvasir-SEG: A Segmented Polyp Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07069/) (2019)
- [Born Again Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04770/) (2018)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Deep Layer Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06484/) (2017)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [A Benchmark for Endoluminal Scene Segmentation of Colonoscopy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00799/) (2016)
- [Cascaded Partial Decoder for Fast and Accurate Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08739/) (2019)
- [Receptive Field Block Net for Accurate and Fast Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07767/) (2017)
- [Shallow Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00882/) (2021)
- [Automatic Polyp Segmentation via Multi-scale Subtraction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05082/) (2021)
- [HarDNet: A Low Memory Traffic Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00948/) (2019)
- [HarDNet-MSEG: A Simple Encoder-Decoder Polyp Segmentation Neural Network that Achieves over 0.9 Mean Dice and 86 FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07172/) (2021)
- [A multi-centre polyp detection and segmentation dataset for generalisability assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04463/) (2021)
- [NeoUNet: Towards accurate colon polyp segmentation and neoplasm detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05023/) (2021)
- [Self-Distillation from the Last Mini-Batch for Consistency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16172/) (2022)
- [TransNetR: Transformer-based Residual Network for Polyp Segmentation with Multi-Center Out-of-Distribution Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07428/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning models have been proposed for automatic polyp detection and precise segmentation of polyps during colonoscopy procedures. Although these state-of-the-art models achieve high performance, they often require a large number of parameters. Their complexity can make them prone to overfitting, particularly when trained on biased datasets, and can result in poor generalization across diverse datasets. Knowledge distillation and self-distillation are proposed as promising strategies to mitigate the limitations of large, over-parameterized models. These approaches, however, are resource-intensive, often requiring multiple models and significant memory during training. We propose a confidence-based self-distillation approach that outperforms state-of-the-art models by utilizing only previous iteration data storage during training, without requiring extra computation or memory usage during testing. Our approach calculates the loss between the previous and current iterations within a batch using a dynamic confidence coefficient. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments on the task of polyp segmentation. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models and generalizes well across datasets collected from multiple clinical centers. The code will be released to the public once the paper is accepted.