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Boundary-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Zero-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Chenlin Xu, Lei Zhang, Lituan Wang, Xinyu Pu, Pengfei Ma, Guangwu Qian, Zizhou Wang, Yan Wang

Published: 2025-12-04

arXiv ID: 2512.04520v1

Added to Library: 2025-12-05 03:03 UTC

📄 Abstract

Due to the scarcity of annotated data and the substantial computational costs of model, conventional tuning methods in medical image segmentation face critical challenges. Current approaches to adapting pretrained models, including full-parameter and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, still rely heavily on task-specific training on downstream tasks. Therefore, zero-shot segmentation has gained increasing attention, especially with foundation models such as SAM demonstrating promising generalization capabilities. However, SAM still faces notable limitations on medical datasets due to domain shifts, making efficient zero-shot enhancement an urgent research goal. To address these challenges, we propose BA-TTA-SAM, a task-agnostic test-time adaptation framework that significantly enhances the zero-shot segmentation performance of SAM via test-time adaptation. This framework integrates two key mechanisms: (1) The encoder-level Gaussian prompt injection embeds Gaussian-based prompts directly into the image encoder, providing explicit guidance for initial representation learning. (2) The cross-layer boundary-aware attention alignment exploits the hierarchical feature interactions within the ViT backbone, aligning deep semantic responses with shallow boundary cues. Experiments on four datasets, including ISIC, Kvasir, BUSI, and REFUGE, show an average improvement of 12.4\% in the DICE score compared with SAM's zero-shot segmentation performance. The results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models in medical image segmentation. Our framework significantly enhances the generalization ability of SAM, without requiring any source-domain training data. Extensive experiments on publicly available medical datasets strongly demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/Emilychenlin/BA-TTA-SAM.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of ASTRIDE, an automated threat modeling platform specifically designed for AI agent-based applications.
  • Extension of the traditional STRIDE framework to include a new category for AI Agent-Specific Attacks, addressing unique security challenges in AI systems.
  • Utilization of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) combined with OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM to automate threat analysis from visual system diagrams.
  • Demonstration of improved accuracy, scalability, and explainability in threat modeling for intelligent systems through experimental evaluations.
  • Establishment of a comprehensive automated process that reduces reliance on human experts for threat identification in AI-driven applications.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

The paper presents ASTRIDE as a pioneering framework that addresses the emerging security concerns associated with AI agent-based systems. By automating the threat modeling process and enhancing the STRIDE framework with AI-specific threats, ASTRIDE provides a robust tool for developers and security professionals to effectively analyze and mitigate potential vulnerabilities in complex AI architectures.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is of significant interest to AI security researchers as it tackles the urgent need for effective security measures in AI systems, which are increasingly vulnerable to novel attack vectors. The innovative combination of fine-tuned VLMs and reasoning LLMs to automate threat modeling offers a scalable and efficient solution, while the emphasis on AI-specific vulnerabilities fills a critical gap in existing threat modeling methodologies. This approach not only enhances the security posture of AI applications but also contributes valuable knowledge to the field of AI security.

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