arXiv AI

Robustifying pathology foundation models via fine-tuning

arXiv:2607. 22861v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models (FMs) produce powerful tile-level representations which remain sensitive to scanner and staining variability, undermining deployment across laboratories.

arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

HERO: Histology Encoder for Robust Representation in Oncology

HERO (Histology Encoder for Robust Representation in Oncology) is a ViT‑G/14 pathology foundation model trained with DINO and iBOT objectives and refined using high‑resolution Gram anchoring on a 500‑million‑tile corpus from about 575,000 clinical whole‑slide images. It demonstrates superior robustness to center, scanner, and stain variation compared to other state‑of‑the‑art foundation models, while maintaining competitive performance on tile‑level classification, segmentation, and gene‑expression prediction. Across 39 slide‑level clinical tasks, HERO ranks first on average and achieves the best average rank across six benchmark frameworks under an equal‑weighted analysis.

By Zhi Li (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Eghbal Amidi (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Yating Cheng (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Tyson Dawson (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Gorkem Can Ates (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Shuzhen Kuang (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Norsang Lama (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Md Ashequr Rahman (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Zhiying Lu (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Elisabeth K. Kong (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Milan Radovich (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), David Spetzler (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Matthew Oberley (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), George W. Sledge (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States), Ming Chen (Caris Life Sciences, Irving, TX, United States)
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

Atlas 2 -- Foundation models for clinical deployment

arXiv:2601. 05148v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models substantially advanced the possibilities in computational pathology --- yet tradeoffs in terms of performance, robustness, and computational requirements remained, which limited their clinical deployment.

By Maximilian Alber, Timo Milbich, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Stephan Tietz, Jonas Dippel, Lukas Muttenthaler, Beatriz Perez Cancer, Alessandro Benetti, Panos Korfiatis, Elias Eulig, J\'er\^ome L\"uscher, Jiasen Wu, Sayed Abid Hashimi, Gabriel Dernbach, Simon Schallenberg, Neelay Shah, Moritz Kr\"ugener, Aniruddh Jammoria, Jake Matras, Patrick Duffy, Matt Redlon, Philipp Jurmeister, David Horst, Lukas Ruff, Klaus-Robert M\"uller, Frederick Klauschen, Andrew Norgan
arXiv AI
Aug 5

A Deployment-Friendly Foundational Framework for Efficient Computational Pathology

arXiv:2602. 14010v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models (PFMs) generalize well across computational pathology tasks but remain costly for gigapixel whole-slide image analysis.

By Yu Cai, Cheng Jin, Zhengyu Zhang, Jiabo Ma, Fengtao Zhou, Yingxue Xu, Zhengrui Guo, Yihui Wang, Zhengyu Zhang, Ling Liang, Yonghao Tan, Pingcheng Dong, Du Cai, On Ki Tang, Chenglong Zhao, Zhijian Cen, Ying Tan, Xi Wang, Can Yang, Yali Xu, Jing Cui, Zhenhui Li, Ronald Cheong Kin Chan, Yueping Liu, Feng Gao, Xiuming Zhang, Li Liang, Hao Chen, Kwang-Ting Cheng
arXiv AI
Sep 4

TAP-Path: Task-Adaptive Structural and Token Pruning for Efficient and Trustworthy Pathology Foundation Models

TAP-Path is a task‑adaptive compression framework that restructures a pretrained Virchow2 encoder for histopathology. It selectively removes transformer blocks, prunes patch tokens, and adds a lightweight gated task head, reducing parameters by 24.96% and FLOPs by 35.20% while maintaining high accuracy on a 32‑class benchmark. The method achieves competitive test metrics and improved rare‑class performance, with strong external validation on CPTAC samples.

By Mehedi Hasan, Ashfak Yeafi, Md Khairul Islam
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Do Center Biases Propagate? Robustness of Pathology Foundation Models in Whole-Slide Image Classification

The study investigates whether pathology foundation models (PFMs) carry center-related biases into whole-slide image (WSI) classification. By training models with increasing class-center correlations and evaluating six PFMs across four datasets and two MIL aggregators, the authors introduce the Area Under the Cramér's V Curve (AUCC) to measure both accuracy and degradation due to spurious correlations. Results reveal that center information propagates to WSI predictions, with robustness varying by PFM and MIL strategy, and that ComBat harmonization does not consistently improve robustness.

By Il\'an Carretero, Pablo Meseguer, Roc\'io del Amor, Valery Naranjo