EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

2329. DISM: A Distributed Incremental Subgradient Method for Weakly Supervised Skin Segmentation

Invited abstract in session MD-50: Variational analysis and equilibria, stream Variational analysis, equilibria and nonsmooth optimization.

Monday, 14:30-16:00
Room: Parkinson B11

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Narges Araboljadidi
Department of Mathematics and Physics, University of Campania ”Luigi Vanvitelli”
2. Valentina De Simone
Mathematics and Physics, University of Campania "L. Vanvitelli"

Abstract

We present a novel Distributed Incremental Subgradient Method (DISM) for Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) applied to skin segmentation. Traditional approaches require labor-intensive pixel-level annotations, while our weakly supervised framework uses only image-level labels, treating images as bags of pixels with binary indicators of skin presence. Our method optimizes the resultant non-smooth, non-convex objective function with an efficient distributed architecture and reduced-synchronization strategies that prevent parallel processing overhead with retained convergence properties. Experiments with the UCI skin segmentation dataset show our method achieving significantly higher accuracy (79.25\%) compared to the MATLAB toolbox method with sequential minimal optimization with SVM (59.81\%), with 50.3\% computational time saved (from 17.38 to 8.64 seconds). This contribution implies how distributed MIL can effectively leverage weak labels to counteract annotation load with greater scalability for large-scale segmentation problems with high accuracy and computational savings.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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