Flatness-aware Curriculum Learning via Adversarial Difficulty

Neural networks trained by empirical risk minimization often suffer from overfitting, especially to specific samples or domains, which leads to poor generalization. Curriculum Learning (CL) addresses this issue by selecting training samples based on the difficulty. From the optimization perspective, methods such as Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improve robustness and generalization by seeking flat minima. However, combining CL with SAM is not straightforward. In flat regions, both the loss values and the gradient norms tend to become uniformly small, which makes it difficult to evaluate sample difficulty and design an effective curriculum. To overcome this problem, we propose the Adversarial Difficulty Measure (ADM), which quantifies adversarial vulnerability by leveraging the robustness properties of models trained toward flat minima. Unlike loss- or gradient-based measures, which become ineffective as training progresses into flatter regions, ADM remains informative by measuring the normalized loss gap between original and adversarial examples. We incorporate ADM into CL-based training with SAM to dynamically assess sample difficulty. We evaluated our approach on image classification tasks, fine-grained recognition, and domain generalization. The results demonstrate that our method preserves the strengths of both CL and SAM while outperforming existing curriculum-based and flatness-aware training strategies.

Vision-Language In-Context Learning Driven Few-Shot Visual Inspection Model

We propose general visual inspection model using Vision-Language Model~(VLM) with few-shot images of non-defective or defective products, along with explanatory texts that serve as inspection criteria. Although existing VLM exhibit high performance across various tasks, they are not trained on specific tasks such as visual inspection. Thus, we construct a dataset consisting of diverse images of non-defective and defective products collected from the web, along with unified formatted output text, and fine-tune VLM. For new products, our method employs In-Context Learning, which allows the model to perform inspections with an example of non-defective or defective image and the corresponding explanatory texts with visual prompts. This approach eliminates the need to collect a large number of training samples and re-train the model for each product. The experimental results show that our method achieves high performance, with MCC of 0.804 and F1-score of 0.950 on MVTec AD in a one-shot manner. Our code is available at~https://github.com/ia-gu/Vision-Language-In-Context-Learning-Driven-Few-Shot-Visual-Inspection-Model.