# Weakly Supervised Object Detection in Chest X-Rays with Differentiable ROI Proposal Networks and Soft ROI Pooling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11985 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11985/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [CheXpert: A Large Chest Radiograph Dataset with Uncertainty Labels and Expert Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07031/) (2019)
- [ChestX-ray8: Hospital-scale Chest X-ray Database and Benchmarks on Weakly-Supervised Classification and Localization of Common Thorax Diseases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02315/) (2017)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06839/) (2018)
- [CheXNet: Radiologist-Level Pneumonia Detection on Chest X-Rays with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05225/) (2017)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00138/) (2017)
- [PCL: Proposal Cluster Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03342/) (2018)
- [Instance-aware, Context-focused, and Memory-efficient Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04725/) (2020)
- [ContextLocNet: Context-Aware Deep Network Models for Weakly Supervised Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04331/) (2016)
- [Attention-Guided Curriculum Learning for Weakly Supervised Classification and Localization of Thoracic Diseases on Chest Radiographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07532/) (2018)
- [SLV: Spatial Likelihood Voting for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12884/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Learning for COVID-19 Infection Detection and Classification from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06689/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Learning for Thoracic Disease Classification and Localization on Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06067/) (2018)
- [Anatomy-Guided Weakly-Supervised Abnormality Localization in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12704/) (2022)
- [Robust Detection Outcome: A Metric for Pathology Detection in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01920/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [MAIRA-2: Grounded Radiology Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04449/) (2024)
- [ChEX: Interactive Localization and Region Description in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15770/) (2024)
- [From Gaze to Insight: Bridging Human Visual Attention and Vision Language Model Explanation for Weakly-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11368/) (2025)
- [Weakly Supervised Pneumonia Localization from Chest X-Rays Using Deep Neural Network and Grad-CAM Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00456/) (2025)
- [Anatomy-Structured Hierarchical MIL for Weakly-Supervised Thoracic Disease Detection in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33520/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised object detection (WSup-OD) increases the usefulness and interpretability of image classification algorithms without requiring additional supervision. The successes of multiple instance learning in this task for natural images, however, do not translate well to medical images due to the very different characteristics of their objects (i.e. pathologies). In this work, we propose Weakly Supervised ROI Proposal Networks (WSRPN), a new method for generating bounding box proposals on the fly using a specialized region of interest-attention (ROI-attention) module. WSRPN integrates well with classic backbone-head classification algorithms and is end-to-end trainable with only image-label supervision. We experimentally demonstrate that our new method outperforms existing methods in the challenging task of disease localization in chest X-ray images. Code: https://github.com/philip-mueller/wsrpn