用对抗蒸馏训练小型乳腺癌专用病理模型,更小更快且更准。
Harnessing Adversarial Distillation to Customise Debiased, Disease-Specific Pathology Foundation Models for Breast Cancer

- 通过对抗蒸馏让小模型学会忽略无关噪声特征
- 模型体积缩小30倍以上,准确率仍保持甚至提升
- 适合临床部署的轻量级乳腺癌病理分析
病理基础模型(PFMs)在数字病理中提供强大的组织表征,但其在特定疾病场景中的应用受限于两大问题:一是百亿参数模型计算成本高;二是跨癌症、多中心预训练带来的分布偏差与非生物性偏见,如机构特异性特征和疾病流行不均,易引发捷径学习,弱化对细微形态的捕捉。为此,我们提出SmartStu框架,通过蒸馏将多个教师模型的知识迁移到轻量学生模型,实现乳腺癌特化。关键创新在于引入对抗蒸馏机制:训练一个专用噪声模型以预测蒸馏集上的干扰性、边缘主导线索,再利用该模型作为反例,引导学生识别并抑制与干扰目标相关的特征。同时结合多教师集成蒸馏与含伪影注入的辅助自监督目标。在三个外部队列(Yale HER2、SLN-Breast、BRACS)上验证,使用多个微型骨干网络,SmartStu生成的乳腺癌特化模型体积超过30倍小于通用模型,同时在平衡准确率(bAcc)和AUC上保持或超越原模型性能。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Pathology foundation models (PFMs) provide strong tissue representations and have become central to digital pathology. However, deployment in disease-specific settings is limited by 1) the high computational cost of billion-parameter PFMs and 2) distribution mismatch and non-biological bias inherited from pan-cancer, multi-centre pre-training, including site-specific signatures and imbalanced disease prevalence. These factors can encourage shortcut learning and under-emphasise subtle morphology required for reliable modelling of a specific cancer type. We present SmartStu (a Smart Student), a framework to customise compact, breast-cancer-specific PFMs via distillation whilst mitigating confounding. SmartStu distils representations from multiple teacher PFMs into a lightweight student backbone. Crucially, we introduce adversarial distillation that leverages a dedicated noise model trained to predict nuisance, edge-dominated cues on the distillation set. Using this noise model as a counterexample, the adversarial objective encourages the student to recognise, yet suppress, features predictive of nuisance targets. We further incorporate multi-teacher ensemble distillation and an auxiliary self-supervised objective with artefact injection. We validate SmartStu on three external cohorts (Yale HER2, SLN-Breast, and BRACS) with multiple tiny backbones. SmartStu yields breast-cancer-specific PFMs that are over $30\times$ smaller than general PFMs whilst largely preserving, and sometimes improving, downstream performance measured by balanced accuracy (bAcc) and AUC. Code is available at https://github.com/zwchen03/advDistall.
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