[Submitted on 15 Jul 2026]
Title:Selective Prediction and Uncertainty-Aware Referral for Pap Smear Classification
View a PDF of the paper titled Selective Prediction and Uncertainty-Aware Referral for Pap Smear Classification, by Nisreen Albzour and 1 other authors
View PDF
Abstract:Deep learning models for cervical cytology are almost always evaluated as if every prediction must be acted upon, yet a screening system deployed alongside a cytopathologist need not classify every slide: it can defer the cases it is least certain about. Evaluating such a system requires asking not only how often it is correct, but whether its confidence ranks its errors to the bottom. This paper studies selective prediction and uncertainty-aware referral on the Herlev Pap smear dataset under a binary Normal-versus-Abnormal formulation. Two lightweight transformer backbones (Swin-Tiny, TinyViT-5M) are fine-tuned on Herlev from ImageNet-pretrained weights with weighted random sampling, calibrated by post-hoc temperature scaling fit on a held-out calibration subset, and compared against a soft-voting ensemble of both models. Discrimination is reported alongside expected calibration error (ECE) and, as the primary endpoint, the area under the risk-coverage curve (AURC). No statistically significant difference was detected between the two configurations in accuracy or macro-F1, yet the ensemble halves AURC (0.0022 vs. 0.0045, a 51.8% reduction, lower in all five folds) and extends the coverage at which zero errors are made from 18.3% to 72.8% of the pooled test predictions. The same ensemble is nonetheless worse calibrated in absolute terms (ECE 0.0339 vs. 0.0247) and produces more false negatives (14 vs. 10). These results separate two properties that are frequently conflated: the ability to rank predictions by trustworthiness, and the accuracy of the confidence values themselves. Ensembling improves the former while degrading the latter, and the former directly governs the observed risk-coverage tradeoff, whereas the latter governs the interpretation of the reported confidence values.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.17545 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.17545v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17545
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Nisreen Albzour [view email] [v1] Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:47:31 UTC (713 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled Selective Prediction and Uncertainty-Aware Referral for Pap Smear Classification, by Nisreen Albzour and 1 other authors
View PDF
view license
Current browse context:
cs.CV
new | recent | 2026-09
Change to browse by:
cs
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)