# Pathological Prior-Guided Multiple Instance Learning For Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Breast Cancer Whole Slide Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06056 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06056/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Computational Pathology on Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09666/) (2020)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02647/) (2022)
- [DyTox: Transformers for Continual Learning with DYnamic TOken eXpansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11326/) (2021)
- [InfLoRA: Interference-Free Low-Rank Adaptation for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00228/) (2024)
- [Quantifying the effects of data augmentation and stain color normalization in convolutional neural networks for computational pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06543/) (2019)
- [Smooth Loss Functions for Deep Top-k Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07595/) (2018)
- [Transfer without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00388/) (2022)
- [SDDGR: Stable Diffusion-based Deep Generative Replay for Class Incremental Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17323/) (2024)
- [Towards Efficient Replay in Federated Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05890/) (2024)
- [LifeLonger: A Benchmark for Continual Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05737/) (2022)
- [ConSlide: Asynchronous Hierarchical Interaction Transformer with Breakup-Reorganize Rehearsal for Continual Whole Slide Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13324/) (2023)
- [Prediction Error-based Classification for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18806/) (2023)
- [MIND: Multi-Task Incremental Network Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02916/) (2023)
- [Kernel Attention Transformer (KAT) for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13156/) (2022)
- [Continual Learning for Tumor Classification in Histopathology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03609/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In histopathology, intelligent diagnosis of Whole Slide Images (WSIs) is essential for automating and objectifying diagnoses, reducing the workload of pathologists. However, diagnostic models often face the challenge of forgetting previously learned data during incremental training on datasets from different sources. To address this issue, we propose a new framework PaGMIL to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in breast cancer WSI classification. Our framework introduces two key components into the common MIL model architecture. First, it leverages microscopic pathological prior to select more accurate and diverse representative patches for MIL. Secondly, it trains separate classification heads for each task and uses macroscopic pathological prior knowledge, treating the thumbnail as a prompt guide (PG) to select the appropriate classification head. We evaluate the continual learning performance of PaGMIL across several public breast cancer datasets. PaGMIL achieves a better balance between the performance of the current task and the retention of previous tasks, outperforming other continual learning methods. Our code will be open-sourced upon acceptance.