Harmonizing Generalization and Specialization: Uncertainty-Informed Collaborative Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces UnCoL, a dual-teacher semi-supervised learning framework that combines general foundation knowledge with task-specific adaptation, improving medical image segmentation especially with limited annotations.

Contribution

UnCoL is the first to integrate a frozen foundation model with an adaptive teacher for semi-supervised medical segmentation, balancing generalization and specialization.

Findings

UnCoL outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods.

Achieves near fully supervised performance with fewer annotations.

Effective in diverse 2D and 3D segmentation benchmarks.

Abstract

Vision foundation models have demonstrated strong generalization in medical image segmentation by leveraging large-scale, heterogeneous pretraining. However, they often struggle to generalize to specialized clinical tasks under limited annotations or rare pathological variations, due to a mismatch between general priors and task-specific requirements. To address this, we propose Uncertainty-informed Collaborative Learning (UnCoL), a dual-teacher framework that harmonizes generalization and specialization in semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Specifically, UnCoL distills both visual and semantic representations from a frozen foundation model to transfer general knowledge, while concurrently maintaining a progressively adapting teacher to capture fine-grained and task-specific representations. To balance guidance from both teachers, pseudo-label learning in UnCoL is adaptively regulated by predictive uncertainty, which selectively suppresses unreliable supervision and stabilizes learning in ambiguous regions. Experiments on diverse 2D and 3D segmentation benchmarks show that UnCoL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods and foundation model baselines. Moreover, our model delivers near fully supervised performance with markedly reduced annotation requirements.