# UGPL: Uncertainty-Guided Progressive Learning for Evidence-Based Classification in Computed Tomography

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14102 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14102/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06839/) (2018)
- [Co-Scale Conv-Attentional Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06399/) (2021)
- [Recent advances and clinical applications of deep learning in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13381/) (2021)
- [COVID-CT-Dataset: A CT Scan Dataset about COVID-19](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13865/) (2020)
- [Supervised Uncertainty Quantification for Segmentation with Multiple Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01949/) (2019)
- [Trustworthy Multimodal Regression with Mixture of Normal-inverse Gamma Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08456/) (2021)
- [Quantifying and Leveraging Predictive Uncertainty for Medical Image Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04258/) (2020)
- [An Uncertainty-aware Transfer Learning-based Framework for Covid-19 Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14846/) (2020)
- [Region-Based Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Uncertainty and Improve Robustness of Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06038/) (2022)
- [A survey on attention mechanisms for medical applications: are we moving towards better algorithms?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12406/) (2022)
- [Lymphoma segmentation from 3D PET-CT images using a deep evidential network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13078/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty Quantification for Deep Unrolling-Based Computational Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00698/) (2022)
- [RCoNet: Deformable Mutual Information Maximization and High-order Uncertainty-aware Learning for Robust COVID-19 Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11099/) (2021)
- [EVIL: Evidential Inference Learning for Trustworthy Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08988/) (2023)
- [An Evidential-enhanced Tri-Branch Consistency Learning Method for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07032/) (2024)
- [3D Arterial Segmentation via Single 2D Projections and Depth Supervision in Contrast-Enhanced CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08481/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty Quantification in Medical Image Segmentation with Multi-decoder U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07045/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate classification of computed tomography (CT) images is essential for diagnosis and treatment planning, but existing methods often struggle with the subtle and spatially diverse nature of pathological features. Current approaches typically process images uniformly, limiting their ability to detect localized abnormalities that require focused analysis. We introduce UGPL, an uncertainty-guided progressive learning framework that performs a global-to-local analysis by first identifying regions of diagnostic ambiguity and then conducting detailed examination of these critical areas. Our approach employs evidential deep learning to quantify predictive uncertainty, guiding the extraction of informative patches through a non-maximum suppression mechanism that maintains spatial diversity. This progressive refinement strategy, combined with an adaptive fusion mechanism, enables UGPL to integrate both contextual information and fine-grained details. Experiments across three CT datasets demonstrate that UGPL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of 3.29%, 2.46%, and 8.08% in accuracy for kidney abnormality, lung cancer, and COVID-19 detection, respectively. Our analysis shows that the uncertainty-guided component provides substantial benefits, with performance dramatically increasing when the full progressive learning pipeline is implemented. Our code is available at: https://github.com/shravan-18/UGPL