用专家混合提升病理图像分类,让每张切片自适应地生成更好特征。
Mixture of Mini Experts: Overcoming the Linear Layer Bottleneck in Multiple Instance Learning
- 引入多头专家混合模块,为每张切片定制低秩特征变换。
- 在19个任务上平均提升3.8%准确率,优于传统线性层。
- 可无缝接入现有方法,参数增加极少,适合医疗图像研究者。
多实例学习(MIL)是计算病理学中分类吉字节级全切片图像的主流框架。MIL流程包括:1)提取切片块特征;2)通过线性层转换为任务相关特征;3)聚合块特征得到整张切片表示进行分类。尽管已有大量工作优化特征提取和聚合,但第二步——将通用特征转为任务特定特征的线性层尚未被重视。我们假设该层构成被忽视的性能瓶颈,并提出通过针对每个切片表型设计的低秩变换,可获得更强表示,且与现有MIL方法具有协同效应。为此,我们提出MAMMOTH:一种参数高效、多头专家混合模块,可最小改动原有模型提升性能。在8种MIL方法和19个分类任务上,这种任务特异性变换对性能的影响超过聚合方式的选择。例如,配备MAMMOTH后,即使简单的最大值或均值池化也优于使用标准线性层的任何方法。总体上,MAMMOTH在152种配置中的130种实现性能提升,平均提高3.8%。代码见https://github.com/mahmoodlab/mammoth。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is the predominant framework for classifying gigapixel whole-slide images in computational pathology. MIL follows a sequence of 1) extracting patch features, 2) applying a linear layer to obtain task-specific patch features, and 3) aggregating the patches into a slide feature for classification. While substantial efforts have been devoted to optimizing patch feature extraction and aggregation, none have yet addressed the second point, the critical layer which transforms general-purpose features into task-specific features. We hypothesize that this layer constitutes an overlooked performance bottleneck and that stronger representations can be achieved with a low-rank transformation tailored to each patch's phenotype, yielding synergistic effects with any of the existing MIL approaches. To this end, we introduce MAMMOTH, a parameter-efficient, multi-head mixture of experts module designed to improve the performance of any MIL model with minimal alterations to the total number of parameters. Across eight MIL methods and 19 different classification tasks, we find that such task-specific transformation has a larger effect on performance than the choice of aggregation method. For instance, when equipped with MAMMOTH, even simple methods such as max or mean pooling attain higher average performance than any method with the standard linear layer. Overall, MAMMOTH improves performance in 130 of the 152 examined configurations, with an average $+3.8\%$ change in performance. Code is available at https://github.com/mahmoodlab/mammoth.
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