AI RESEARCH

Learning Class Difficulty in Imbalanced Histopathology Segmentation via Dynamic Focal Attention

arXiv CS.CV

ArXi:2604.13479v1 Announce Type: cross Semantic segmentation of histopathology images under class imbalance is typically addressed through frequency-based loss reweighting, which implicitly assumes that rare classes are difficult. However, true difficulty also arises from morphological variability, boundary ambiguity, and contextual similarity-factors that frequency cannot capture. We propose Dynamic Focal Attention (DFA), a simple and efficient mechanism that learns class-specific difficulty directly within the cross-attention of query-based mask decoders. DFA