# Leveraging Spatial Context for Positive Pair Sampling in Histopathology Image Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05170 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05170/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Large Batch Training of Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03888/) (2017)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [DTFD-MIL: Double-Tier Feature Distillation Multiple Instance Learning for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12081/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning on Diverse Pathology Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04690/) (2022)
- [Medical Image Synthesis for Data Augmentation and Anonymization using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10225/) (2018)
- [Tile2Vec: Unsupervised representation learning for spatially distributed data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.02855/) (2018)
- [Self-Path: Self-supervision for Classification of Pathology Images with Limited Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05571/) (2020)
- [GANs for Medical Image Synthesis: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05318/) (2021)
- [Hibou: A Family of Foundational Vision Transformers for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05074/) (2024)
- [A survey on Semi-, Self- and Unsupervised Learning for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08721/) (2020)
- [Constrained Deep Weak Supervision for Histopathology Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00794/) (2017)
- [Context-Aware Convolutional Neural Network for Grading of Colorectal Cancer Histology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09478/) (2019)
- [Classification and Disease Localization in Histopathology Using Only Global Labels: A Weakly-Supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02212/) (2018)
- [Transformer based multiple instance learning for weakly supervised histopathology image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08878/) (2022)
- [Focus on the Positives: Self-Supervised Learning for Biodiversity Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06435/) (2021)
- [Automated Classification of Histopathology Images Using Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10035/) (2019)
- [SimTriplet: Simple Triplet Representation Learning with a Single GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05585/) (2021)
- [Improving Representation Learning for Histopathologic Images with Cluster Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12334/) (2023)
- [Kernel Attention Transformer (KAT) for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13156/) (2022)
- [HistoTransfer: Understanding Transfer Learning for Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07068/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning has shown strong potential in cancer classification from whole-slide images (WSIs), but the need for extensive expert annotations often limits its success. Annotation-free approaches, such as multiple instance learning (MIL) and self-supervised learning (SSL), have emerged as promising alternatives to traditional annotation-based methods. However, conventional SSL methods typically rely on synthetic data augmentations, which may fail to capture the spatial structure critical to histopathology. In this work, we propose a spatial context-driven positive pair sampling strategy that enhances SSL by leveraging the morphological coherence of spatially adjacent patches within WSIs. Our method is modular and compatible with established joint embedding SSL frameworks, including Barlow Twins, BYOL, VICReg, and DINOv2. We evaluate its effectiveness on both slide-level classification using MIL and patch-level linear probing. Experiments across four datasets demonstrate consistent performance improvements, with accuracy gains of 5% to 10% compared to standard augmentation-based sampling. These findings highlight the value of spatial context in improving representation learning for computational pathology and provide a biologically meaningful enhancement for pretraining models in annotation-limited settings. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/contextual-pairs-E72F/.