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When Adaptation Hurts: Connecting Representational Drift to OOD Failures in MedSAM Fine-Tuning

Research Medical/Healthcare AI

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Merged summary

TL;DR - Fine-tuning MedSAM improves in-domain and nearby-domain segmentation but can hurt performance under large distribution shifts. The study links these failures to decoder representation drift and identifies adaptation and prompt-training strategies that better preserve robustness.

  • Full fine-tuning offered the best overall tradeoff across in-distribution, close-OOD, and far-OOD datasets.
  • Encoder-only LoRA was the strongest parameter-efficient method, outperforming standard LoRA and visual prompt tuning on far-OOD data.
  • Centered Kernel Alignment analysis associated far-OOD degradation with decoder drift; encoder similarity alone did not explain robustness.
  • Training with random 0–100-pixel prompt jitter improved performance and resilience to noisy prompts.

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When Adaptation Hurts: Connecting Representational Drift to OOD Failures in MedSAM Fine-Tuning

arXiv cs.CV Marko Haralović, Sounic Akkaraju, Carlo Baretta, Vasil Zapryanov, Alexia Briassouli 2026-08-21 arXiv:2608.21300
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 1 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 1
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 1 · Influential citations 1 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-21 14:32:40.883684 UTC

TL;DR - Fine-tuning MedSAM improves in-domain and nearby-domain segmentation but can hurt performance under large distribution shifts. The study links these failures to decoder representation drift and identifies adaptation and prompt-training strategies that better preserve robustness.

  • Full fine-tuning offered the best overall tradeoff across in-distribution, close-OOD, and far-OOD datasets.
  • Encoder-only LoRA was the strongest parameter-efficient method, outperforming standard LoRA and visual prompt tuning on far-OOD data.
  • Centered Kernel Alignment analysis associated far-OOD degradation with decoder drift; encoder similarity alone did not explain robustness.
  • Training with random 0–100-pixel prompt jitter improved performance and resilience to noisy prompts.
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