The impact of U-Net architecture choices and skip connections on the robustness of segmentation across texture variations

These findings suggest that skip connections offer performance benefits, usually at the expense of robustness losses, depending on the degree of texture disparity between the foreground and background, and the range of texture variations present in the training set. This indicates careful evaluation of their use for robustness-critical tasks like medical image segmentation. Combinations of texture-aware architectures must be investigated to achieve better performance-robustness characteristics.