# Self-supervised driven consistency training for annotation efficient histopathology image analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.03897 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03897/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Visual Feature Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06162/) (2019)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [Meta Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10580/) (2020)
- [Transfusion: Understanding Transfer Learning for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07208/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09782/) (2016)
- [Lookahead Optimizer: k steps forward, 1 step back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08610/) (2019)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [What Should Not Be Contrastive in Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05659/) (2020)
- [Adversarially Learned Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00704/) (2016)
- [Scaling and Benchmarking Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01235/) (2019)
- [Quantifying the effects of data augmentation and stain color normalization in convolutional neural networks for computational pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06543/) (2019)
- [Deep neural network models for computational histopathology: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12378/) (2019)
- [Demystifying Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning: Invariances, Augmentations and Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13916/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Visual Language Pretrained Multiple Instance Zero-Shot Transfer for Histopathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07831/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Vision Transformers Learn Visual Concepts in Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00585/) (2022)
- [A General-Purpose Self-Supervised Model for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15474/) (2023)
- [Robust and Efficient Medical Imaging with Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09723/) (2022)
- [WSSS4LUAD: Grand Challenge on Weakly-supervised Tissue Semantic Segmentation for Lung Adenocarcinoma](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06455/) (2022)
- [Towards 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 Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08789/) (2022)
- [Self supervised learning improves dMMR/MSI detection from histology slides across multiple cancers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05819/) (2021)
- [ScoreNet: Learning Non-Uniform Attention and Augmentation for Transformer-Based Histopathological Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07570/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Pathology Foundation Models: Adaptation Strategies and Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16038/) (2024)
- [Nuclei Segmentation with Point Annotations from Pathology Images via Self-Supervised Learning and Co-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08195/) (2022)
- [Label-Efficient Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis: Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12484/) (2023)
- [Learning Representations with Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Histopathology Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05760/) (2021)
- [Global Contrast Masked Autoencoders Are Powerful Pathological Representation Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09048/) (2022)
- [A Review of Predictive and Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05043/) (2023)
- [From Modern CNNs to Vision Transformers: Assessing the Performance, Robustness, and Classification Strategies of Deep Learning Models in Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05044/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification: A Bag-Level Classifier is a Good Instance-Level Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01099/) (2023)
- [Iteratively Coupled Multiple Instance Learning from Instance to Bag Classifier for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15749/) (2023)
- [SLPD: Slide-level Prototypical Distillation for WSIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10696/) (2023)
- [A Dual-branch Self-supervised Representation Learning Framework for Tumour Segmentation in Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11019/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Nerve Fiber Distribution Patterns in 3D-PLI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17207/) (2024)
- [GenSelfDiff-HIS: Generative Self-Supervision Using Diffusion for Histopathological Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01487/) (2023)
- [Pan-cancer Histopathology WSI Pre-training with Position-aware Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07504/) (2024)
- [FMDNN: A Fuzzy-guided Multi-granular Deep Neural Network for Histopathological Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15312/) (2024)
- [PosDiffAE: Position-aware Diffusion Auto-encoder For High-Resolution Brain Tissue Classification Incorporating Artifact Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02405/) (2025)
- [S3R: Self-supervised Spectral Regression for Hyperspectral Histopathology Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08770/) (2022)
- [A vision transformer-based framework for knowledge transfer from multi-modal to mono-modal lymphoma subtyping models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01328/) (2023)
- [EP-SAM: Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation via Enhanced Prompt with Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13621/) (2024)
- [Advancing Histopathology with Deep Learning Under Data Scarcity: A Decade in Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19820/) (2024)
- [About Explicit Variance Minimization: Training Neural Networks for Medical Imaging With Limited Data Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14117/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Domain Generalization for Digital Pathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05100/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training a neural network with a large labeled dataset is still a dominant paradigm in computational histopathology. However, obtaining such exhaustive manual annotations is often expensive, laborious, and prone to inter and Intra-observer variability. While recent self-supervised and semi-supervised methods can alleviate this need by learn-ing unsupervised feature representations, they still struggle to generalize well to downstream tasks when the number of labeled instances is small. In this work, we overcome this challenge by leveraging both task-agnostic and task-specific unlabeled data based on two novel strategies: i) a self-supervised pretext task that harnesses the underlying multi-resolution contextual cues in histology whole-slide images to learn a powerful supervisory signal for unsupervised representation learning; ii) a new teacher-student semi-supervised consistency paradigm that learns to effectively transfer the pretrained representations to downstream tasks based on prediction consistency with the task-specific un-labeled data. We carry out extensive validation experiments on three histopathology benchmark datasets across two classification and one regression-based tasks, i.e., tumor metastasis detection, tissue type classification, and tumor cellularity quantification. Under limited-label data, the proposed method yields tangible improvements, which is close or even outperforming other state-of-the-art self-supervised and supervised baselines. Furthermore, we empirically show that the idea of bootstrapping the self-supervised pretrained features is an effective way to improve the task-specific semi-supervised learning on standard benchmarks. Code and pretrained models will be made available at: https://github.com/srinidhiPY/SSL_CR_Histo