# PathoWAve: A Deep Learning-based Weight Averaging Method for Improving Domain Generalization in Histopathology Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15685 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15685/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [SWAD: Domain Generalization by Seeking Flat Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08604/) (2021)
- [Lookahead Optimizer: k steps forward, 1 step back](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08610/) (2019)
- [Learning to Generate Novel Domains for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03304/) (2020)
- [The Role of Permutation Invariance in Linear Mode Connectivity of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06296/) (2021)
- [Gradient Matching for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09937/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01805/) (2019)
- [Invariance Principle Meets Information Bottleneck for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06607/) (2021)
- [Improving Out-of-Distribution Robustness via Selective Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00299/) (2022)
- [SelfReg: Self-supervised Contrastive Regularization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09841/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization Using a Mixture of Multiple Latent Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07661/) (2019)
- [Whole-Slide Mitosis Detection in H&E Breast Histology Using PHH3 as a Reference to Train Distilled Stain-Invariant Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05896/) (2018)
- [Learning domain-agnostic visual representation for computational pathology using medically-irrelevant style transfer augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01678/) (2021)
- [Test-time image-to-image translation ensembling improves out-of-distribution generalization in histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09769/) (2022)
- [TFS-ViT: Token-Level Feature Stylization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15698/) (2023)
- [EPVT: Environment-aware Prompt Vision Transformer for Domain Generalization in Skin Lesion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01508/) (2023)
- [Lookaround Optimizer: k steps around, 1 step average](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07684/) (2023)
- [Prompt-driven Latent Domain Generalization for Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03002/) (2024)
- [Histopathological Image Analysis with Style-Augmented Feature Domain Mixing for Improved Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20638/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in deep learning (DL) have significantly advanced medical image analysis. In the field of medical image processing, particularly in histopathology image analysis, the variation in staining protocols and differences in scanners present significant domain shift challenges, undermine the generalization capabilities of models to the data from unseen domains, prompting the need for effective domain generalization (DG) strategies to improve the consistency and reliability of automated cancer detection tools in diagnostic decision-making. In this paper, we introduce Pathology Weight Averaging (PathoWAve), a multi-source DG strategy for addressing domain shift phenomenon of DL models in histopathology image analysis. Integrating specific weight averaging technique with parallel training trajectories and a strategically combination of regular augmentations with histopathology-specific data augmentation methods, PathoWAve enables a comprehensive exploration and precise convergence within the loss landscape. This method significantly enhanced generalization capabilities of DL models across new, unseen histopathology domains. To the best of our knowledge, PathoWAve is the first proposed weight averaging method for DG in histopathology image analysis. Our quantitative results on Camelyon17 WILDS dataset demonstrate PathoWAve's superiority over previous proposed methods to tackle the domain shift phenomenon in histopathology image processing. Our code is available at urlhttps://github.com/ParastooSotoudeh/PathoWAve.