通过动态剪枝与稀疏化,让病理大模型更高效且可信。
TAP-Path: Task-Adaptive Structural and Token Pruning for Efficient and Trustworthy Pathology Foundation Models

- 根据任务自适应选择保留的模型结构块和图像令牌,直接重构预训练模型。
- 参数减少24.96%、计算量降低35.2%,精度仍达87.98%(±0.067%)。
- 适合追求高效可靠病理分析的医学AI研究者与临床部署团队。
病理学基础模型提升了组织病理图像的可迁移表征能力,但近期性能提升依赖于数亿参数的编码器,推理成本高昂。本文提出TAP-Path,一种直接重构预训练Virchow2编码器的任务自适应压缩框架,不采用知识蒸馏。该方法结合验证驱动的Transformer块选择、冗余块物理移除、输入自适应的补丁-令牌剪枝、多层级特征恢复及轻量级门控任务头。最终模型保留24/32个Transformer块和70%的补丁令牌,编码器参数从631.24M降至473.70M(减少24.96%),分析计算量从340.13G FLOPs降至220.40G FLOPs(减少35.20%)。在32类病理基准上,测试准确率87.98%(±0.067%)、平衡准确率81.26%(±0.49%)、宏F1为82.38%(±0.48%),优于全量Virchow2(86.89%)和UNI2-h(87.67%)。Brier分数0.1800(±0.0005),故障检测AUROC达0.9047(±0.0060)。仅使用验证集的稀有类别感知目标进一步提升了稀有类别平衡准确率。在433例CPTAC外部样本上的冻结评估中,准确率91.22%(±0.83%),平衡准确率91.10%(±0.81%)。结果表明,任务自适应的结构与令牌稀疏化可在保持可靠性的同时显著改善大模型的效率-精度权衡。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Pathology foundation models improve transferable representation learning for histopathology, but recent gains often rely on encoders with hundreds of millions of parameters and high inference cost. We propose TAP-Path, a task-adaptive compression framework that directly restructures a pretrained Virchow2 encoder rather than distilling it into a separate student. TAP-Path combines validation-driven transformer-block selection, physical removal of redundant blocks, input-adaptive patch-token pruning, multi-depth feature recovery, and a lightweight gated task head. The final model retains 24 of 32 transformer blocks and 70% of patch tokens after pruning, reducing encoder parameters by 24.96% (631.24M to 473.70M) and analytical encoder compute by 35.20% (340.13G to 220.40G FLOPs). Across three task-head optimization seeds, TAP-Path achieved $87.98 \pm 0.067%$ test accuracy, $81.26 \pm 0.49%$ balanced accuracy, and $82.38 \pm 0.48%$ macro-F1 on a 32-class histopathology benchmark, compared with 86.89% for full Virchow2 and 87.67% for UNI2-h. TAP-Path achieved a Brier score of $0.1800 \pm 0.0005$ and failure-detection AUROC of $0.9047 \pm 0.0060$. A validation-only rare-aware objective improved rare-class balanced accuracy in a secondary operating analysis. Frozen external evaluation on 433 CPTAC samples yielded $91.22 \pm 0.83%$ accuracy and $91.10 \pm 0.81%$ balanced accuracy. These results show that task-adaptive structural and token sparsification can improve the accuracy-efficiency trade-off of large pathology foundation models while preserving reliability under internal and external evaluation.
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