Uma Maheswara Rao Meleti

Uma Meleti, Jeffrey J. Nirschl

Accurate histopathologic interpretation is key for clinical decision-making; however, current deep learning models for digital pathology are often overconfident and poorly calibrated in out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, which limit trust and clinical adoption. Safety-critical medical imaging workflows benefit from intrinsic uncertainty-aware properties that can accurately reject OOD input. We implement the Spectral-normalized Neural Gaussian Process (SNGP), a set of lightweight modifications that apply spectral normalization and replace the final dense layer with a Gaussian process layer to improve single-model uncertainty estimation and OOD detection. We evaluate SNGP vs. deterministic and MonteCarlo dropout on six datasets across three biomedical classification tasks: white blood cells, amyloid plaques, and colorectal histopathology. SNGP has comparable in-distribution performance while significantly improving uncertainty estimation and OOD detection. Thus, SNGP or related models offer a useful framework for uncertainty-aware classification in digital pathology, supporting safe deployment and building trust with pathologists.

Trinath Sai Subhash Reddy Pittala, Uma Maheswara Rao Meleti, Geethakrishna Puligundla

Recent developments in adversarial machine learning have highlighted the importance of building robust AI systems to protect against increasingly sophisticated attacks. While frameworks like AI Guardian are designed to defend against these threats, they often rely on assumptions that can limit their effectiveness. For example, they may assume attacks only come from one direction or include adversarial images in their training data. Our proposal suggests a different approach to the AI Guardian framework. Instead of including adversarial examples in the training process, we propose training the AI system without them. This aims to create a system that is inherently resilient to a wider range of attacks. Our method focuses on a dynamic defense strategy using stable diffusion that learns continuously and models threats comprehensively. We believe this approach can lead to a more generalized and robust defense against adversarial attacks. In this paper, we outline our proposed approach, including the theoretical basis, experimental design, and expected impact on improving AI security against adversarial threats.