arXiv:2504.14783cs.CVcs.AI2025-04ICML被引 10

提出针对多实例学习的新型丢弃策略,显著提升模型性能与鲁棒性。

How Effective Can Dropout Be in Multiple Instance Learning ?

  • 通过丢弃每包中最重要的k个实例来增强模型泛化能力。
  • 在五个基准数据集和两个病理切片数据集上均实现性能提升。
  • 方法计算开销极低,适合实际应用中的病理图像分析。

多实例学习(MIL)是一种广泛用于各类弱监督任务的流行方法,尤其在组织学全切片图像(WSI)分类中备受关注。由于WSI具有千兆像素级分辨率,现有MIL方法通常采用两阶段训练:先从预训练骨干网络提取特征,再进行MIL聚合。然而,这种次优训练方案易受骨干网络产生的“噪声”特征嵌入和固有的弱监督限制,阻碍MIL学习丰富且可泛化的特征表示。尽管丢弃(dropout)是缓解该问题的常用手段,但其在MIL中的有效性尚未被充分探索。本文通过实证研究发现,在一个包内丢弃前k个最重要实例反而能带来更好的性能和泛化能力,即使在噪声攻击下依然有效。基于此观察,我们提出一种专为MIL设计的丢弃方法——MIL-Dropout,可系统性地确定应丢弃的实例。在五个MIL基准数据集及两个WSI数据集上的实验表明,该方法在几乎不增加计算成本的前提下,显著提升了现有MIL方法的性能。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a popular weakly-supervised method for various applications, with a particular interest in histological whole slide image (WSI) classification. Due to the gigapixel resolution of WSI, applications of MIL in WSI typically necessitate a two-stage training scheme: first, extract features from the pre-trained backbone and then perform MIL aggregation. However, it is well-known that this suboptimal training scheme suffers from "noisy" feature embeddings from the backbone and inherent weak supervision, hindering MIL from learning rich and generalizable features. However, the most commonly used technique (i.e., dropout) for mitigating this issue has yet to be explored in MIL. In this paper, we empirically explore how effective the dropout can be in MIL. Interestingly, we observe that dropping the top-k most important instances within a bag leads to better performance and generalization even under noise attack. Based on this key observation, we propose a novel MIL-specific dropout method, termed MIL-Dropout, which systematically determines which instances to drop. Experiments on five MIL benchmark datasets and two WSI datasets demonstrate that MIL-Dropout boosts the performance of current MIL methods with a negligible computational cost. The code is available at https://github.com/ChongQingNoSubway/MILDropout.

多实例学习丢弃策略病理图像

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