arXiv AI September 24, 2026 By Il\'an Carretero, Pablo Meseguer, Roc\'io del Amor, Valery Naranjo

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.

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arXiv Computer Vision

4d ago

Exploiting Spatial Structure for Transductive Few-Shot Classification of Whole-Slide Images

The paper introduces SlideTIM, a transductive few‑shot classification method tailored for whole‑slide images (WSIs). SlideTIM extends the LC‑TIM approach by adding a spatial‑latent regularizer and a class‑distribution prior, ensuring that spatially and semantically similar patches receive consistent predictions and that predicted class proportions are calibrated. Experiments on four histology datasets show that SlideTIM outperforms existing TIM variants, boosting macro‑F1 scores by up to 8.1 percentage points over the best baseline and 19.4 percentage points over zero‑shot predictions at one shot.

By Tiffanie Godelaine, Manon Dausort, Karim El Khoury, Beno\^it G\'erin, Beno\^it Macq, Christophe De Vleeschouwer

llms multimodal

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 7

The Good, the Bad, and the Brittle: Benchmarking Robustness and Generalisation of Histopathology Foundation Models

arXiv:2607. 04401v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How robust and generalisable are pathology foundation models and have their scaling limites been reached?

By Dhyey Yajnik, Amina Asif, Fayyaz Minhas

benchmarks safety data-engineering

arXiv Computer Vision

2d 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)

computer-vision benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 14

A Distributional Robustness Margin For Pathology Foundation Models

arXiv:2607. 25497v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models encode non-biological variation introduced by tissue preparation, staining and scanning, enabling shortcut learning that undermines generalisation across institutions.

By Cl\'ement Grisi, Jeroen van der Laak, Geert Litjens

benchmarks

arXiv AI

Jul 17

Pretraining Multiple Instance Learning Networks with Multi-Teacher Distillation from Pathology Slide Foundation Models

arXiv:2607. 14703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multiple instance learning (MIL) has become the main paradigm for whole-slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology.

By Mingxi Fu, Jiawen Li, Renao Yan, Jiali Hu, Qiehe Sun, Tian Guan, Yonghong He

llms computer-vision fine-tuning efficiency benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Sep 3

Morphology signal in whole slide image foundation models can automatically triage slides

The paper introduces a pipeline that uses publicly available whole slide image foundation models (FMs) to automatically triage slides by ranking them based on zero‑shot classification predictions. This approach accurately identifies slides containing the most tumor, achieving top‑2 ranking for patients with up to 43 slides across multiple datasets. The study also proposes a ranked evaluation framework to benchmark FM performance in slide triage.

By Ayushi Sinha, Shashank Yadav, Benjamin Holmes, Pravat Das, Aaron W. Bogan, James S. Lewis Jr., Santiago Romero-Brufau, Andrew Y. K. Foong, Scott H. Kaufmann, Kathryn M. Van Abel, David M. Routman, Michael R. Lucas