用病理切片大模型做教师,蒸馏预训练轻量MIL模型,提升小样本表现。
Pretraining Multiple Instance Learning Networks with Multi-Teacher Distillation from Pathology Slide Foundation Models

- 用TITAN和CARE两个大模型作为教师,蒸馏知识到多种MIL架构。
- 在15个数据集上验证,线性探测和少样本场景下性能显著提升。
- 提出角度分散归一化损失,平衡多教师蒸馏效果,适合医疗图像研究者。
多实例学习(MIL)已成为计算病理学中全切片图像(WSI)分析的主要范式。然而,现有MIL聚合器通常从头训练,依赖有限的切片级标签同时学习聚合机制与下游判别表征,导致优化不稳定、过拟合且可迁移性差。类似自然图像中的预训练ResNet和Vision Transformer,MIL也需要可复用的预训练初始化。但高质量切片级预训练数据稀缺,且MIL模型通常轻量弱监督,实际难以大规模预训练。为此,本文提出一种基于蒸馏的MIL预训练框架,利用两个切片级基础模型TITAN和CARE作为教师,将它们的表征知识传递给多种MIL架构。为有效平衡不同教师的监督,引入角度分散归一化蒸馏损失。蒸馏得到的权重用于下游适配初始化。在15个基准数据集上进行系统评估,涵盖线性探测与全参数微调,并验证其在少样本场景下的优势。实验表明,预训练显著优于从头训练,尤其在线性探测和少样本设置下,同时保持轻量MIL模型的计算效率。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multiple instance learning (MIL) has become the main paradigm for whole-slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology. However, existing MIL aggregators are still typically trained from scratch for each downstream task, relying on limited slide-level labels to learn both aggregation mechanisms and downstream discriminative representations simultaneously. As a result, they often suffer from unstable optimization, overfitting, and limited transferability. Similar to pretrained ResNet and Vision Transformer models in natural image learning, MIL also requires reusable pretrained initialization. However, high-quality slide-level pretraining data remain scarce, and MIL models are usually lightweight and weakly supervised, making large-scale pretraining difficult in practice. To address this challenge, we propose a distillation-based pretraining framework for MIL, which leverages two slide-level foundation models, TITAN and CARE, as teachers to transfer their representational knowledge into a diverse set of MIL architectures. To effectively balance supervision from different teachers, we further introduce an angular dispersion normalized distillation loss. The distilled weights are then used as initialization for downstream adaptation. We conduct systematic evaluations on 15 benchmark datasets under both linear probing and full-parameter fine-tuning, and further validate its advantages in few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that pretraining generally improves MIL aggregators over from scratch training, especially in linear-probing and few-shot settings, while maintaining the computational efficiency of lightweight MIL models. Code is available at https://github.com/fu0201/MIL_Pretrained.
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