REVIEW 2 major objections 1 minor 14 references
A class-aware dual mixture-of-experts network segments scleral anomalies at 72.11 percent mean Dice on a new benchmark dataset.
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
T0 review · grok-4.3
2026-06-28 06:46 UTC pith:XWCINMK7
load-bearing objection This paper adds a new scleral anomaly dataset and a dual-MoE decoder on DINOv3 but reports no baselines, ablations, or numbers for its generalization claim. the 2 major comments →
HD-DinoMoE: A Class-Aware Hierarchical Dual Mixture-of-Experts Network for Scleral Anomaly Segmentation in Complex Acquisition Scenarios
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
HD-DinoMoE combines class-aware dual-stream DINOv3 feature fusion with class-specific multi-expert decoding, stabilized by three-stage backbone-frozen routing, to segment Vessels, Yellow and Black Spots, and Blood Spots. The Progressive Confidence Penalty Loss and Class-Aware Adaptive Sample Weighting further mitigate specular reflection issues and class imbalances. This yields 72.11% mean Dice and 58.44% mean IoU on the ML-SASD-Mix setting, with good boundary control and reduced false positives in specular regions, plus competitive results on SBVPI Vessels.
What carries the argument
The class-aware hierarchical dual mixture-of-experts network that performs dual-stream DINOv3 feature fusion and class-specific multi-expert decoding.
Load-bearing premise
The specific combination of dual-stream DINOv3 fusion, class-specific experts, three-stage routing, PCP loss, and CA-ASW sufficiently handles the challenges of distributional discrepancies, anomaly diversity, and specular reflections.
What would settle it
If a baseline model without these components matches or exceeds the 72.11% Dice and 58.44% IoU on ML-SASD-Mix while controlling specular false positives, the necessity of the proposed machinery would be questioned.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The manuscript introduces HD-DinoMoE, a class-aware hierarchical dual mixture-of-experts network that fuses DINOv3 features via dual streams and decodes with class-specific experts for segmenting Vessels, Yellow/Black Spots, and Blood Spots in scleral images. It proposes a three-stage backbone-frozen routing strategy, Progressive Confidence Penalty (PCP) Loss, and Class-Aware Adaptive Sample Weighting (CA-ASW), constructs the ML-SASD dataset (Clinical/Wild/Mix settings with pixel annotations), and reports mean Dice of 72.11% and mean IoU of 58.44% on ML-SASD-Mix while claiming competitive generalization on the Vessels subset of SBVPI.
Significance. If the performance numbers are shown to exceed strong baselines with ablations and statistical support, the work would offer a practical contribution to automated TCM ocular inspection by addressing multi-source shifts, anomaly variability, and specular reflections. The release of a new annotated multi-label scleral dataset is a clear positive; however, the current lack of comparative evidence makes it impossible to determine whether the architectural and loss innovations deliver meaningful gains.
major comments (2)
- [Abstract] Abstract: the assertion that the method 'shows competitive generalization on the Vessels subset of the public SBVPI dataset' supplies no numerical Dice/IoU values, standard deviations, comparison table, or definition of 'competitive'. This directly undermines the generalization component of the central claim.
- [Abstract] Abstract: the reported 72.11% Dice / 58.44% IoU on ML-SASD-Mix is presented without any baseline methods, ablation results on the dual-stream fusion / multi-expert decoder / PCP Loss / CA-ASW components, or statistical significance tests. These omissions are load-bearing because the soundness of the performance claim cannot be assessed without them.
minor comments (1)
- [Abstract] Abstract: phrases such as 'favorable boundary localization and specular-region false-positive control' are stated qualitatively; quantitative boundary metrics (e.g., Hausdorff distance) or region-specific false-positive rates would strengthen the description.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for the constructive feedback on the abstract. We agree that the abstract must be strengthened to stand alone and will revise it to include explicit numerical support and references to the detailed experiments. Point-by-point responses follow.
read point-by-point responses
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Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: the assertion that the method 'shows competitive generalization on the Vessels subset of the public SBVPI dataset' supplies no numerical Dice/IoU values, standard deviations, comparison table, or definition of 'competitive'. This directly undermines the generalization component of the central claim.
Authors: We accept the observation. The full manuscript reports the SBVPI Vessels results (including Dice, IoU, standard deviations, and direct comparisons) in Section 4.3 and the corresponding table. The abstract will be revised to include these specific values and to define 'competitive' by reference to the quantitative margins shown in the comparison table. revision: yes
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Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: the reported 72.11% Dice / 58.44% IoU on ML-SASD-Mix is presented without any baseline methods, ablation results on the dual-stream fusion / multi-expert decoder / PCP Loss / CA-ASW components, or statistical significance tests. These omissions are load-bearing because the soundness of the performance claim cannot be assessed without them.
Authors: The abstract is a concise summary; the manuscript contains baseline comparisons (Section 4), component-wise ablations on dual-stream fusion, multi-expert decoder, PCP Loss and CA-ASW (Section 5 and tables), and we can incorporate statistical significance where appropriate. We will revise the abstract to note the performance margins over baselines and the ablation-validated contributions of each proposed element. revision: partial
Circularity Check
No circularity: empirical evaluation on new dataset with independent metrics
full rationale
The paper proposes HD-DinoMoE architecture and constructs the ML-SASD dataset, then reports Dice/IoU metrics on its Mix split and a qualitative generalization note on SBVPI. No equations, self-definitions, or self-citations reduce any claimed result to a fitted input by construction; performance numbers are direct outputs of evaluation on held-out annotations. The absence of SBVPI numbers is an evidence gap, not circularity.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
free parameters (2)
- Routing and expert count in dual MoE decoder
- Weighting coefficients in PCP Loss and CA-ASW
axioms (2)
- domain assumption Pre-trained DINOv3 features remain sufficiently invariant under the distributional shifts present in clinical and wild scleral images.
- domain assumption Pixel-wise ground-truth labels in ML-SASD accurately capture the three anomaly categories across all acquisition settings.
invented entities (2)
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Progressive Confidence Penalty (PCP) Loss
no independent evidence
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Class-Aware Adaptive Sample Weighting (CA-ASW)
no independent evidence
read the original abstract
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) ocular inspection provides empirical cues for assessing scleral surface anomalies, but its clinical use remains subjective and difficult to quantify. To support intelligent and quantifiable ocular inspection, this study presents the TCM-inspired Artificial Intelligence Ocular Auxiliary Diagnosis System (TAO) and focuses on pixel-level scleral surface anomaly segmentation. For clinical and user-acquired images affected by multi-source distributional discrepancies, diverse anomaly morphologies, and scleral specular reflection (SSR), we propose HD-DinoMoE, a class-aware hierarchical dual mixture-of-experts network. HD-DinoMoE combines class-aware dual-stream DINOv3 feature fusion with class-specific multi-expert decoding to segment Vessels, Yellow and Black Spots, and Blood Spots. A three-stage backbone-frozen routing strategy stabilizes dual-backbone adaptation; Progressive Confidence Penalty (PCP) Loss reduces high-confidence false positives and segmentation leakage in SSR regions; and Class-Aware Adaptive Sample Weighting (CA-ASW) balances sample- and class-level training contributions. We further construct the Multi-label Scleral Anomaly Segmentation Dataset (ML-SASD), a new benchmark with Clinical, Wild, and Mix settings and pixel-wise annotations for three anomaly categories. On ML-SASD-Mix, HD-DinoMoE achieves a mean Dice of 72.11% and a mean Intersection-over-Union of 58.44%, while maintaining favorable boundary localization and specular-region false-positive control. It also shows competitive generalization on the Vessels subset of the public SBVPI dataset. These results indicate that HD-DinoMoE provides a feasible segmentation solution for TAO under complex acquisition scenarios. The code and data access information are available at https://github.com/FX-CMX/HD-DinoMoE.
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