arXiv:2609.08419cs.CV2026-09

让注意力模型更可信:通过反事实推理提升病理图像弱监督学习的可解释性。

CAR-MIL: Counterfactual Attention Regularization for Multiple Instance Learning

论文配图:CAR-MIL: Counterfactual Attention Regularization for Multiple Instance Learning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 引入反事实注意力分支,引导模型关注真正重要的病变区域。
  • 在五个病理数据集上保持竞争力,挑战任务下准确率提升显著。
  • 适合关注模型可解释性与医疗诊断可靠性的研究者。

多实例学习(MIL)广泛用于弱监督学习,尤其在数字病理学中,精细标注成本高昂。现有MIL方法通常通过注意力机制聚合实例特征,但注意力权重未必真实反映实例重要性,可能聚焦于虚假相关区域。本文提出CAR-MIL框架,通过受反事实解释启发的注意力正则化目标,显式引导注意力学习。基于标准注意力MIL架构,该方法引入轻量级反事实注意力分支,训练其生成替代预测,同时保持与真实注意力分布接近。这促使预测变化源于最小且结构化的注意力重分配,实现更合理的证据分配。最终,真实与反事实注意力图分别揭示支持和挑战预测的区域,提供互补证据。我们在具有实例级真值的合成基准和五个数字病理数据集(四类任务)上评估该方法。CAR-MIL在保持竞争性分类性能的同时,显著提升注意力可靠性,尤其在更具挑战性的任务中表现更优。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is widely used for weakly supervised learning, particularly in digital pathology, where fine-grained annotations are costly. Most MIL methods aggregate instance features via attention mechanisms. However, attention weights do not always faithfully reflect instance importance and may focus on spuriously correlated regions. In this work, we propose CAR-MIL, a framework that explicitly guides attention learning through a counterfactual attention regularization objective inspired by counterfactual explanations. Built on a standard attention-based MIL architecture, our approach introduces a lightweight counterfactual attention branch trained to produce an alternative prediction while remaining close to the factual attention distribution. This encourages prediction changes to arise from minimal, structured redistributions of attention, leading to more informative evidence allocation. The resulting factual and counterfactual attention maps capture complementary evidence: the former highlights regions supporting the prediction, while the latter reveals regions whose reweighting would challenge it. We evaluate our method on synthetic MIL benchmarks with instance-level ground truth enabling controlled analysis of attention behavior and on five digital pathology datasets across four tasks. CAR-MIL maintains competitive classification performance, with the largest gains observed on more challenging tasks, while improving attention reliability, demonstrating the benefits of integrating counterfactual explainability reasoning into attention learning. Code is available at: https://github.com/ImaneCR/CAR-MIL/.

弱监督可解释性病理分析注意力机制

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