测试时自适应会改变病理模型的解释,影响临床可信度。
Explanation Stability of Test-Time Adaptation in Computational Pathology: A Large-Scale Benchmark

- 用大规模基准测试不同自适应方法对模型解释的影响。
- 冻结主干的方法解释更稳定,连续更新方法漂移最大。
- 解释稳定性与准确率无关,需独立评估临床可靠性。
测试时自适应(TTA)已成为部署后模型适应未标注目标数据的实用方法,在计算病理学中尤为关键,因染色、扫描仪和队列差异普遍存在。尽管多数TTA方法仅以准确率评估,但临床应用还依赖于模型解释在自适应后的可靠性。本文首次系统研究了两种组织病理学基准(Camelyon17 和 NCT CRC-HE)下,五种架构(从卷积网络到视觉变换器及病理基础模型)、十七种TTA方法和四种归因方法在2,958次自适应运行中的解释稳定性。结果表明:不同方法对解释的影响差异显著,冻结主干的方法几乎不改变归因,而持续性方法如CoTTA和RoTTA导致最大漂移;卷积网络比变换器和基础模型更敏感;解释漂移随自适应强度增加,但受批量大小影响小。令人意外的是,解释稳定性与自适应性能弱相关:某些方法虽几乎完全保留解释,却显著降低校准或准确率,造成隐蔽失败,仅靠准确率或解释单一评估无法发现。这些发现表明,解释稳定性是计算病理学中TTA的独立可靠性维度。我们公开了评估指标、协议和完整基准,推动未来开发不仅准确,而且稳定、可审计的自适应方法。代码:https://github.com/bahumanyarg11/tta-explanation-stability-pipeline
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Test-time adaptation (TTA) has become a practical way to adapt deployed models to unlabeled target data, a setting that is especially relevant in computational pathology where staining, scanner, and cohort shifts are routine. While most TTA methods are evaluated by their effect on accuracy, clinical use also depends on whether the model's explanations remain reliable after adaptation. In this paper, we take a closer look at this largely unmeasured effect. We study explanation stability under TTA across two histopathology benchmarks, Camelyon17 and NCT CRC-HE, using five architectures ranging from convolutional networks to vision transformers and a pathology foundation model, seventeen TTA methods, and four attribution families. Across 2,958 adaptation runs, we observe a clear and systematic pattern: TTA methods differ sharply in how much they move model explanations, with frozen-backbone methods leaving attributions almost unchanged and continual methods such as CoTTA and RoTTA causing the largest drift. This effect is not uniform. Convolutional networks are substantially more sensitive than transformer and foundation-model backbones, and explanation drift increases with adaptation strength while remaining largely insensitive to batch size. Surprisingly, explanation stability is only weakly coupled to adaptation quality. Some methods preserve explanations almost perfectly while degrading calibration or accuracy, producing silent failures that would be missed by accuracy-only or explanation-only evaluation. These findings show that explanation stability is a distinct reliability axis for TTA in computational pathology. We release the metric, protocol, and full benchmark to support future work on adaptation methods that are not only accurate, but also stable and clinically auditable. Code: https://github.com/bahumanyarg11/tta-explanation-stability-pipeline
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