mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning

arXiv 2011.08939 ↗First posted 17 Nov 2020cs.CV cs.LGcited by 478

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Abstract (arXiv)

We address the challenging problem of whole slide image (WSI) classification. WSIs have very high resolutions and usually lack localized annotations. WSI classification can be cast as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem when only slide-level labels are available. We propose a MIL-based method for WSI classification and tumor detection that does not require localized annotations. Our method has three major components. First, we introduce a novel MIL aggregator that models the relations of the instances in a dual-stream architecture with trainable distance measurement. Second, since WSIs can produce large or unbalanced bags that hinder the training of MIL models, we propose to use self-supervised contrastive learning to extract good representations for MIL and alleviate the issue of prohibitive memory cost for large bags. Third, we adopt a pyramidal fusion mechanism for multiscale WSI features, and further improve the accuracy of classification and localization. Our model is evaluated on two representative WSI datasets. The classification accuracy of our model compares favorably to fully-supervised methods, with less than 2% accuracy gap across datasets. Our results also outperform all previous MIL-based methods. Additional benchmark results on standard MIL datasets further demonstrate the superior performance of our MIL aggregator on general MIL problems. GitHub repository: https://github.com/binli123/dsmil-wsi

Key facts. Cited by 478 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 11; 2022: 56; 2023: 96; 2024: 112; 2025: 107; 2026: 96.

478 papers.

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  1. 2021TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 555
  2. 2022Scaling Vision Transformers to Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learningcited by 359
  3. 2022DTFD-MIL: Double-Tier Feature Distillation Multiple Instance Learning for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 256
  4. 2022Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning on Diverse Pathology Datasetscited by 150
  5. 2023Visual Language Pretrained Multiple Instance Zero-Shot Transfer for Histopathology Imagescited by 134
  6. 2023Artificial Intelligence for Digital and Computational Pathologycited by 108
  7. 2023Interventional Bag Multi-Instance Learning On Whole-Slide Pathological Imagescited by 91
  8. 2024MambaMIL: Enhancing Long Sequence Modeling with Sequence Reordering in Computational Pathologycited by 88
  9. 2023Multimodal Optimal Transport-based Co-Attention Transformer with Global Structure Consistency for Survival Predictioncited by 86
  10. 2024PRISM: A Multi-Modal Generative Foundation Model for Slide-Level Histopathologycited by 85
  11. 2024Morphological Prototyping for Unsupervised Slide Representation Learning in Computational Pathologycited by 72
  12. 2024Feature Re-Embedding: Towards Foundation Model-Level Performance in Computational Pathologycited by 67
38 more
  1. 2024Dynamic Graph Representation with Knowledge-aware Attention for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysiscited by 67
  2. 2021Cluster-to-Conquer: A Framework for End-to-End Multi-Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 65
  3. 2023Attention-Challenging Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 61
  4. 2023Multiple Instance Learning Framework with Masked Hard Instance Mining for Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 60
  5. 2022Additive MIL: Intrinsically Interpretable Multiple Instance Learning for Pathologycited by 58
  6. 2022Multiple Instance Learning for Digital Pathology: A Review on the State-of-the-Art, Limitations & Future Potentialcited by 54
  7. 2023Task-specific Fine-tuning via Variational Information Bottleneck for Weakly-supervised Pathology Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 54
  8. 2023PathLDM: Text conditioned Latent Diffusion Model for Histopathologycited by 52
  9. 2024Accurate Spatial Gene Expression Prediction by integrating Multi-resolution featurescited by 52
  10. 2024Transcriptomics-guided Slide Representation Learning in Computational Pathologycited by 51
  11. 2022Self-Supervised Vision Transformers Learn Visual Concepts in Histopathologycited by 50
  12. 2023Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis with Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learningcited by 47
  13. 2022Differentiable Zooming for Multiple Instance Learning on Whole-Slide Imagescited by 43
  14. 2022Bi-directional Weakly Supervised Knowledge Distillation for Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 43
  15. 2024HistGen: Histopathology Report Generation via Local-Global Feature Encoding and Cross-modal Context Interactioncited by 43
  16. 2023A General-Purpose Self-Supervised Model for Computational Pathologycited by 42
  17. 2023The Rise of AI Language Pathologists: Exploring Two-level Prompt Learning for Few-shot Weakly-supervised Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 41
  18. 2024Prototypical Information Bottlenecking and Disentangling for Multimodal Cancer Survival Predictioncited by 41
  19. 2021Towards Unsupervised Domain Generalizationcited by 40
  20. 2022DGMIL: Distribution Guided Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 40
  21. 2023Learned representation-guided diffusion models for large-image generationcited by 40
  22. 2025PathFinder: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent System for Medical Diagnostic Decision-Making Applied to Histopathologycited by 39
  23. 2022Deep Multi-modal Fusion of Image and Non-image Data in Disease Diagnosis and Prognosis: A Reviewcited by 37
  24. 20242DMamba: Efficient State Space Model for Image Representation with Applications on Giga-Pixel Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 35
  25. 2024WSI-VQA: Interpreting Whole Slide Images by Generative Visual Question Answeringcited by 34
  26. 2024CPath-Omni: A Unified Multimodal Foundation Model for Patch and Whole Slide Image Analysis in Computational Pathologycited by 34
  27. 2022Handcrafted Histological Transformer (H2T): Unsupervised Representation of Whole Slide Imagescited by 32
  28. 2021SlideGraph+: Whole Slide Image Level Graphs to Predict HER2Status in Breast Cancercited by 31
  29. 2023WsiCaption: Multiple Instance Generation of Pathology Reports for Gigapixel Whole-Slide Imagescited by 31
  30. 2022ReMix: A General and Efficient Framework for Multiple Instance Learning based Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 30
  31. 2022Towards Label-efficient Automatic Diagnosis and Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey of Advanced Deep Learning-based Weakly-supervised, Semi-supervised and Self-supervised Techniques in Histopathological Image Analysiscited by 29
  32. 2025CPathAgent: An Agent-based Foundation Model for Interpretable High-Resolution Pathology Image Analysis Mimicking Pathologists' Diagnostic Logiccited by 29
  33. 2025Do Multiple Instance Learning Models Transfer?cited by 29
  34. 2024Multistain Pretraining for Slide Representation Learning in Pathologycited by 28
  35. 2025ViLa-MIL: Dual-scale Vision-Language Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 28
  36. 2023Diagnose Like a Pathologist: Transformer-Enabled Hierarchical Attention-Guided Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classificationcited by 27
  37. 2024Generalizable Whole Slide Image Classification with Fine-Grained Visual-Semantic Interactioncited by 27
  38. 2023ConSlide: Asynchronous Hierarchical Interaction Transformer with Breakup-Reorganize Rehearsal for Continual Whole Slide Image Analysiscited by 25

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