# Graph Domain Adaptation with Dual-branch Encoder and Two-level Alignment for Whole Slide Image-based Survival Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14001 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14001/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Computational Pathology on Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09666/) (2020)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02647/) (2022)
- [Deep neural network models for computational histopathology: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12378/) (2019)
- [Handling Distribution Shifts on Graphs: An Invariance Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02466/) (2022)
- [Visual Language Pretrained Multiple Instance Zero-Shot Transfer for Histopathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07831/) (2023)
- [From Local Structures to Size Generalization in Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08853/) (2020)
- [Transfer Learning of Graph Neural Networks with Ego-graph Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05204/) (2020)
- [Modeling Dense Multimodal Interactions Between Biological Pathways and Histology for Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06819/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Translation and Alignment for Survival Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12855/) (2023)
- [Graph Transfer Learning via Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Graph Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01541/) (2019)
- [Feature Re-Embedding: Towards Foundation Model-Level Performance in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17228/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Graph Representation with Knowledge-aware Attention for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07719/) (2024)
- [CLDA: Contrastive Learning for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00085/) (2021)
- [Transcriptomics-guided Slide Representation Learning in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11618/) (2024)
- [Deep Imbalanced Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06337/) (2023)
- [Shortest Path Networks for Graph Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01003/) (2022)
- [CoCo: A Coupled Contrastive Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04979/) (2023)
- [Topology-Aware Graph Pooling Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09834/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Multi-modal Emotion Learning with Broad State Space Models and Probability-guidance Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17858/) (2024)
- [Revisiting Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation from the Perspective of Graph Spectrum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17862/) (2024)
- [Pathology-and-genomics Multimodal Transformer for Survival Outcome Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11952/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-modal Conversational Emotion Recognition with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05735/) (2023)
- [PathAlign: A vision-language model for whole slide images in histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19578/) (2024)
- [A Low-rank Matching Attention based Cross-modal Feature Fusion Method for Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17799/) (2023)
- [Masked Contrastive Graph Representation Learning for Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17798/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Multimodal Large Language Models Meet Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24322/) (2025)
- [Contrastive Multi-graph Learning with Neighbor Hierarchical Sifting for Semi-supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16787/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Graph Neural ODE Network for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02935/) (2024)
- [GroupFace: Imbalanced Age Estimation Based on Multi-hop Attention Graph Convolutional Network and Group-aware Margin Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11450/) (2024)
- [Dual-branch Graph Domain Adaptation for Cross-scenario Multi-modal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26840/) (2026)
- [SE-GCL: An Event-Based Simple and Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Text Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11652/) (2024)
- [LRA-GNN: Latent Relation-Aware Graph Neural Network with Initial and Dynamic Residual for Facial Age Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05423/) (2025)
- [A Flow Model with Low-Rank Transformers for Incomplete Multimodal Survival Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21829/) (2025)
- [Cross-Resolution Semantic Learning for Graph Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.29365/) (2026)
- [SE-GNN: Seed Expanded-Aware Graph Neural Network with Iterative Optimization for Semi-supervised Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20801/) (2025)
- [TimeGNN-Augmented Hybrid-Action MARL for Fine-Grained Task Partitioning and Energy-Aware Offloading in MEC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06191/) (2026)
- [AINet: Anchor Instances Learning for Regional Heterogeneity in Whole Slide Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20187/) (2026)
- [AMB-DSGDN: Adaptive Modality-Balanced Dynamic Semantic Graph Differential Network for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10043/) (2026)
- [Layout-Guided Controllable Pathology Image Generation with In-Context Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13386/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Fusion-Aware Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22345/) (2026)
- [Relational graph-driven differential denoising and diffusion attention fusion for multimodal conversation emotion recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25752/) (2026)
- [Disentangled Dual-Branch Graph Learning for Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14204/) (2026)
- [Graph Mamba Survival Analysis Based on Topology-Aware ordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02602/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Anchored Evidential Fusion for Domain-Robust Whole-Slide Survival Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19966/) (2026)
- [C2MOE: Consistency and Complementarity-guided Mixture of Experts for Incomplete Multimodal Emotion Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04013/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, histopathological whole slide image (WSI)- based survival analysis has attracted much attention in medical image analysis. In practice, WSIs usually come from different hospitals or laboratories, which can be seen as different domains, and thus may have significant differences in imaging equipment, processing procedures, and sample sources. These differences generally result in large gaps in distribution between different WSI domains, and thus the survival analysis models trained on one domain may fail to transfer to another. To address this issue, we propose a Dual-branch Encoder and Two-level Alignment (DETA) framework to explore both feature and category-level alignment between different WSI domains. Specifically, we first formulate the concerned problem as graph domain adaptation (GDA) by virtue the graph representation of WSIs. Then we construct a dual-branch graph encoder, including the message passing branch and the shortest path branch, to explicitly and implicitly extract semantic information from the graph-represented WSIs. To realize GDA, we propose a two-level alignment approach: at the category level, we develop a coupling technique by virtue of the dual-branch structure, leading to reduced divergence between the category distributions of the two domains; at the feature level, we introduce an adversarial perturbation strategy to better augment source domain feature, resulting in improved alignment in feature distribution. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to alleviate the domain shift issue for WSI data analysis. Extensive experiments on four TCGA datasets have validated the effectiveness of our proposed DETA framework and demonstrated its superior performance in WSI-based survival analysis.