Two for One: Privileged Learning for Resource-Constrained Screening

Overview & Synopsis

Machine learning systems are often developed under data-rich conditions but deployed when only incomplete information is available. A natural example arises in colour fundus photography (CFP), where both eyes are commonly imaged because they can provide complementary information for ocular disease assessment. Prior approaches that exploit bilateral information either fuse both eyes in a single model or use knowledge distillation to compress a dual-eye teacher into a lightweight student that still requires both images at test time. However, bilateral acquisition may not always be feasible. We thus propose a privileged learning framework in which a teacher model has access to bilateral CFP images during training and learns representations informed by information from both eyes, while the student is trained to transfer this knowledge from the bilateral teacher using only a single-eye image as input. At inference, the student operates exclusively on this single-eye input and does not require the contralateral image. Experimental results show consistent improvements in area under the receiver operating characteristic curve over conventional monocular training, with the largest gains observed for left-eye images for the detection of age-related macular degeneration (0.931 vs. 0.966) and diabetic retinopathy (0.789 vs. 0.836).%, while requiring only a single-eye image at inference. By enabling models to benefit from bilateral information during training while requiring only a single-eye image at inference, our approach may support more reliable deployment in resource-constrained clinical and screening environments.