LENS-GRF: Permutation-Invariant Lesion Evidence Network with Gated Residual Fusion for Acne Severity Grading and Multi-Rater Clinical Oracle Analysis

Abstract

Automated acne severity grading requires both whole-face context and fine-grained lesion evidence. We propose LENS-GRF (Lesion Evidence Network with Set-Transformer and Gated Residual Fusion), an interpretable multi-stage framework for four-class acne severity grading. The method combines Adaptive Facial Skin Segmentation and a global Vision Transformer prior with a permutation-invariant Lesion Set Transformer that encodes localized lesion patches and spatial geometry. Gated Residual Fusion adaptively controls the local residual contribution and reduces to the global prediction when the gate is zero. On ACNE04, fully automated LENS-GRF with YOLOv11s achieved 80.82% accuracy; with ground-truth lesion annotations, it achieved 95.89% +/- 0.59% accuracy and a Quadratic Weighted Kappa of 0.9753. A data-integrity audit identified 15 cross-split duplicate image pairs, including five with conflicting severity labels. In locked zero-shot evaluation on the full PLSBRACNE01 cohort (200 subjects, 600 views), automated LENS-GRF achieved 35.00% accuracy versus 42.50% for the global baseline. On the 148-subject common cohort used for three-dermatologist oracle analysis, ground-truth lesion inputs increased the best oracle accuracy to 47.97%, while the highest oracle QWK was 0.5799. Pairwise oracle agreement ranged from 49.32% to 66.22%, highlighting detector domain shift, annotation variability, and cross-criterion mismatch.