The paper introduces a multiscale evidential learning framework for cervical cytology that models disease progression along an ordinal continuum using clinically grounded soft anchors. It encodes nuclear, cytoplasmic, and neighborhood cellular features separately with a shared DINOv2 backbone, then transforms calibrated predictions into Dempster–Shafer belief masses, fusing them with reliability discounting to explicitly handle conflicting or insufficient evidence. The resulting belief state enables interpretable routing that distinguishes confidently classified cases from those requiring further review, and demonstrates consistent generalization across two public cytology datasets with uncertainty correlating strongly with diagnostic difficulty.
By Ajeet Kumar Singh, Nehal Mishra, Anurag Tripathi, Santanu Chaudhury, Dorien Herremans
arXiv:2606. 06224v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Explanations of multiple instance learning (MIL) models are widely used for validation and discovery in digital histopathology.
By Yanqing Luo (Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, Berlin, Germany, Machine Learning Group, Technische Universit\"at Berlin, Berlin, Germany), Julius Hense (Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, Berlin, Germany, Machine Learning Group, Technische Universit\"at Berlin, Berlin, Germany), Niklas Preni{\ss}l (Institute of Pathology, Charit\'e Universit\"atsmedizin, Berlin, Germany, Berlin Institute of Health at Charit\'e -- Universit\"atsmedizin Berlin, BIH Biomedical Innovation Academy, BIH Charit\'e Digital Clinician Scientist Program, Berlin, Germany), Andreas Mock (Institute of Pathology, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Germany, Division of Translational Medical Oncology, DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany, NCT Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany, German Cancer Consortium), Klaus-Robert M\"uller (Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, Berlin, Germany, Machine Learning Group, Technische Universit\"at Berlin, Berlin, Germany, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, Seoul, Korea, Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbr\"ucken, Germany), Thomas Schnake (Department of Chemistry, Chemical Physics Theory Group, University of Toronto, Canada, Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Toronto, Canada, Acceleration Consortium, University of Toronto, Canada), Mina Jamshidi Idaji (Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, Berlin, Germany, Machine Learning Group, Technische Universit\"at Berlin, Berlin, Germany)