# MicroAUNet: Boundary-Enhanced Multi-scale Fusion with Knowledge Distillation for Colonoscopy Polyp Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01143 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01143/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Kvasir-SEG: A Segmented Polyp Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07069/) (2019)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [UNeXt: MLP-based Rapid Medical Image Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04967/) (2022)
- [MALUNet: A Multi-Attention and Light-weight UNet for Skin Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01784/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Study on Colorectal Polyp Segmentation with ResUNet++, Conditional Random Field and Test-Time Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12435/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning for Polyp Segmentation: Techniques, Challenges and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18373/) (2023)
- [PraNet-V2: Dual-Supervised Reverse Attention for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10986/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Early and accurate segmentation of colorectal polyps is critical for reducing colorectal cancer mortality, which has been extensively explored by academia and industry. However, current deep learning-based polyp segmentation models either compromise clinical decision-making by providing ambiguous polyp margins in segmentation outputs or rely on heavy architectures with high computational complexity, resulting in insufficient inference speeds for real-time colorectal endoscopic applications. To address this problem, we propose MicroAUNet, a lightweight attention-based segmentation network, which synergistically combines depthwise-separable dilated convolutions with a single-path, parameter-shared channel-spatial attention block to effectively strengthen multi-scale boundary features. On the basis of it, a progressive two-stage knowledge-distillation scheme is introduced to transfer semantic and boundary cues from a high-capacity teacher. Extensive experiments on benchmarks also demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy under extremely low model complexity, indicating that MicroAUNet is suitable for real-time clinical polyp segmentation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JeremyXSC/MicroAUNet.