Adjacency-Aware Fuzzy Label Learning for Skin Disease Diagnosis

Automatic acne severity grading is crucial for the accurate diagnosis and effective treatment of skin diseases. However, the acne severity grading process is often ambiguous due to the similar appearance of acne with close severity, making it challenging to achieve reliable acne severity grading. Following the idea of fuzzy logic for handling uncertainty in decision-making, we transforms the acne severity grading task into a fuzzy label learning (FLL) problem, and propose a novel adjacency-aware fuzzy label learning (AFLL) framework to handle uncertainties in this task. The AFLL framework makes four significant contributions, each demonstrated to be highly effective in extensive experiments. First, we introduce a novel adjacency-aware decision sequence generation method that enhances sequence tree construction by reducing bias and improving discriminative power. Second, we present a consistency-guided decision sequence prediction method that mitigates error propagation in hierarchical decision-making through a novel selective masking decision strategy. Third, our proposed sequential conjoint distribution loss innovatively captures the differences for both high and low fuzzy memberships across the entire fuzzy label set while modeling the internal temporal order among different acne severity labels with a cumulative distribution, leading to substantial improvements in FLL. Fourth, to the best of our knowledge, AFLL is the first approach to explicitly address the challenge of distinguishing adjacent categories in acne severity grading tasks. Experimental results on the public ACNE04 dataset demonstrate that AFLL significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art in acne severity grading.