NL-MambaXCT: Self-Supervised Nested-Learning Mamba for Nomex Honeycomb X-ray CT Defect Classification

Abstract: X-ray computed tomography (XCT) is widely used for non-destructive testing of Nomex honeycomb structures in aerospace manufacturing, but industrial inspection still relies heavily on manual interpretation and supervised models trained on limited labeled data. This work introduces NL-MambaXCT, a Mamba-based framework that combines self-supervised masked image modelling with a Nested Learning (NL) formulation for automated, label-efficient defect classification from production XCT slices. The backbone is a four-stage 2D encoder with RegNet convolutional blocks in the early stages and Mamba-based sequence mixing with attention in the deeper stages. It is pretrained by masked image modelling on 19,961 unlabeled industrial XCT slices and fine-tuned on 2,000 relabeled Nomex XCT slices split by production order. NL is instantiated through two-timescale parameter dynamics: selected projections maintain slow exponential-moving-average traces alongside fast weights, while a deep-momentum optimizer introduces an additional slow parameter-update trajectory. On the held-out test set, the MIM-pretrained NL-MambaXCT model achieves 96.91% accuracy and 96.8% macro F1, outperforming CNN, attention, and single-timescale Mamba baselines by 3.11--10.31 percentage points in accuracy. The results suggest that combining masked self-supervision with NL-style fast/ slow learning dynamics is a promising strategy for robust defect classification in Nomex honeycomb XCT inspection.