CAMEL: Cross-Architecture Masked Embedding Learning for Ultra-Lightweight Retinal Foundation Models

arXiv:2610.40954v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress in deep learning has substantially advanced automated grading of ophthalmologic pathologies, supported by large annotated datasets and improved representation learning. However, a significant gap remains between state-of-the-art performance and clinical scalability. In particular, foundation models have reshaped image-based medical screening and diagnosis. These large-scale architectures trained on extensive datasets learn rich, generalizable feature representations that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. In ophthalmology, RETFound, one of the most relevant foundation models for retinal images, performs strongly across classification, segmentation, and risk prediction tasks.