English

Toward Aristotelian Medical Representations: Backpropagation-Free Layer-wise Analysis for Interpretable Generalized Metric Learning on MedMNIST

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-08 v1

Abstract

While deep learning has achieved remarkable success in medical imaging, the "black-box" nature of backpropagation-based models remains a significant barrier to clinical adoption. To bridge this gap, we propose Aristotelian Rapid Object Modeling (A-ROM), a framework built upon the Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH). This hypothesis posits that models trained on vast, diverse datasets converge toward a universal and objective representation of reality. By leveraging the generalizable metric space of pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs), A-ROM enables the rapid modeling of novel medical concepts without the computational burden or opacity of further gradient-based fine-tuning. We replace traditional, opaque decision layers with a human-readable concept dictionary and a k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) classifier to ensure the model's logic remains interpretable. Experiments on the MedMNIST v2 suite demonstrate that A-ROM delivers performance competitive with standard benchmarks while providing a simple and scalable, "few-shot" solution that meets the rigorous transparency demands of modern clinical environments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.06017,
  title  = {Toward Aristotelian Medical Representations: Backpropagation-Free Layer-wise Analysis for Interpretable Generalized Metric Learning on MedMNIST},
  author = {Michael Karnes and Alper Yilmaz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.06017},
  year   = {2026}
}