# Hibou: A Family of Foundational Vision Transformers for Pathology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05074/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02647/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning on Diverse Pathology Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04690/) (2022)
- [PanNuke Dataset Extension, Insights and Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10778/) (2020)
- [Virchow: A Million-Slide Digital Pathology Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07778/) (2023)
- [RandStainNA: Learning Stain-Agnostic Features from Histology Slides by Bridging Stain Augmentation and Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12694/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Virchow2: Scaling Self-Supervised Mixed Magnification Models in Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00738/) (2024)
- [Distilling foundation models for robust and efficient models in digital pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16239/) (2025)
- [PathBench: A comprehensive comparison benchmark for pathology foundation models towards precision oncology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20202/) (2025)
- [Training state-of-the-art pathology foundation models with orders of magnitude less data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05186/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Computational Pathology Foundation Models: Datasets, Adaptation Strategies, and Evaluation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15724/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Pathology Foundation Model: Progress and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04045/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Foundation Model-Agnostic Slide-Level Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13623/) (2024)
- [HISTAI: An Open-Source, Large-Scale Whole Slide Image Dataset for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12120/) (2025)
- [SPIDER: A Comprehensive Multi-Organ Supervised Pathology Dataset and Baseline Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02876/) (2025)
- [Atlas: A Novel Pathology Foundation Model by Mayo Clinic, Charit'e, and Aignostics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05409/) (2025)
- [PixCell: A generative foundation model for digital histopathology images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05127/) (2025)
- [A New Era in Computational Pathology: A Survey on Foundation and Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14496/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Computational Pathology Foundation Models for Prostate Cancer Grading under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06723/) (2024)
- [SurGen: 1020 H&E-stained Whole Slide Images With Survival and Genetic Markers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04946/) (2025)
- [Foundation Models in Medical Imaging: A Review and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09095/) (2025)
- [Atlas 2 -- Foundation models for clinical deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05148/) (2026)
- [Pathryoshka: Compressing Pathology Foundation Models via Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation with Nested Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23204/) (2025)
- [TICON: A Slide-Level Tile Contextualizer for Histopathology Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21331/) (2025)
- [Fusion of Multi-scale Heterogeneous Pathology Foundation Models for Whole Slide Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27237/) (2025)
- [MGPATH: Vision-Language Model with Multi-Granular Prompt Learning for Few-Shot WSI Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07409/) (2025)
- [MOOZY: A Patient-First Foundation Model for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27048/) (2026)
- [Controllable Latent Space Augmentation for Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14588/) (2025)
- [G2L:From Giga-Scale to Cancer-Specific Large-Scale Pathology Foundation Models via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11176/) (2025)
- [A High Magnifications Histopathology Image Dataset for Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Diagnosis and Prognosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16360/) (2025)
- [Morphology-Aware Prognostic model for Five-Year Survival Prediction in Colorectal Cancer from H&E Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14800/) (2025)
- [A Deployment-Friendly Foundational Framework for Efficient Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14010/) (2026)
- [Mixed Magnification Aggregation for Generalizable Region-Level Representations in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22176/) (2026)
- [MINT: Molecularly Informed Training with Spatial Transcriptomics Supervision for Pathology Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07895/) (2026)
- [A Comprehensive Benchmark of Histopathology Foundation Models for Kidney Digital Pathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15967/) (2026)
- [Beyond ViT Tokens: Masked-Diffusion Pretrained Convolutional Pathology Foundation Model for Cell-Level Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08276/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pathology, the microscopic examination of diseased tissue, is critical for diagnosing various medical conditions, particularly cancers. Traditional methods are labor-intensive and prone to human error. Digital pathology, which converts glass slides into high-resolution digital images for analysis by computer algorithms, revolutionizes the field by enhancing diagnostic accuracy, consistency, and efficiency through automated image analysis and large-scale data processing. Foundational transformer pretraining is crucial for developing robust, generalizable models as it enables learning from vast amounts of unannotated data. This paper introduces the Hibou family of foundational vision transformers for pathology, leveraging the DINOv2 framework to pretrain two model variants, Hibou-B and Hibou-L, on a proprietary dataset of over 1 million whole slide images (WSIs) representing diverse tissue types and staining techniques. Our pretrained models demonstrate superior performance on both patch-level and slide-level benchmarks, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, Hibou-L achieves the highest average accuracy across multiple benchmark datasets. To support further research and application in the field, we have open-sourced the Hibou models, which can be accessed at https://github.com/HistAI/hibou.