# WILLIE: A Unified Framework and Benchmark for Wound Classification, Segmentation, and Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05341 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05341/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [GradNorm: Gradient Normalization for Adaptive Loss Balancing in Deep Multitask Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02257/) (2017)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Which Tasks Should Be Learned Together in Multi-task Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07553/) (2019)
- [Efficiently Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04617/) (2021)
- [FUSeg: The Foot Ulcer Segmentation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00414/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning with Mixed Supervision for Brain Tumor Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04571/) (2018)
- [FUSegNet: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Foot Ulcer Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02961/) (2023)
- [Image Based Artificial Intelligence in Wound Assessment: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07141/) (2020)
- [Integrated Image and Location Analysis for Wound Classification: A Deep Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11877/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Chronic wound management affects over 8.2 million patients in the United States and imposes substantial clinical and economic burden. Clinical wound assessment commonly involves three coupled tasks: identifying wound type, delineating wound boundaries, and localizing the wound region for measurement and monitoring. Despite this clinical coupling, existing machine learning approaches typically address wound classification, segmentation, and localization using separate models. We present WILLIE, a unified framework and benchmark for wound classification, segmentation and localization that enables systematic evaluation of multi-task wound analysis under a common protocol. WILLIE harmonizes three public wound datasets into a shared benchmark and compares unified models across three scaling configurations against 10 single-task baselines. The best model achieves 91.88% classification accuracy, 91.41% Dice, and 96.23% AP@0.5 while producing all three outputs in a single forward pass. Beyond aggregate performance, our results show that segmentation-derived localization outperforms dedicated detection baselines in this benchmark, suggesting that box-based localization may be unnecessary for spatially coherent wound targets. Our findings highlight that effective multi-task learning in healthcare imaging depends not only on shared representations, but also on task formulation, compatibility, and benchmark design.