# Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Computational Pathology: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09091 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09091/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 83 of its 116 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [LoC-Path: Learning to Compress for Pathology Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05391/) (2025)
- [Learning the Language of Histopathology Images reveals Prognostic Subgroups in Invasive Lung Adenocarcinoma Patients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16742/) (2025)
- [Computational Pathology in the Era of Emerging Foundation and Agentic AI -- International Expert Perspectives on Clinical Integration and Translational Readiness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05884/) (2026)
- [PathMem: Toward Cognition-Aligned Memory Transformation for Pathology MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09943/) (2026)
- [LLM-Enhanced Energy Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text-Attributed Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20293/) (2026)
- [Paired Uterine Whole-Slide Images and Pathology Reports for Multimodal Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04020/) (2026)
- [SIMPLER: H&E-Informed Representation Learning for Structured Illumination Microscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10334/) (2026)
- [Training-Free Out-of-Distribution Detection for Pathology Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01407/) (2026)
- [Lumen: Parameter-Efficient Alignment of Pretrained Vision and Language Encoders for Zero-Shot Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17868/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models have emerged as a powerful paradigm in computational pathology (CPath), enabling scalable and generalizable analysis of histopathological images. While early developments centered on uni-modal models trained solely on visual data, recent advances have highlighted the promise of multi-modal foundation models that integrate heterogeneous data sources such as textual reports, structured domain knowledge, and molecular profiles. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of multi-modal foundation models in CPath, with a particular focus on models built upon hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs) and tile-level representations. We categorize 32 state-of-the-art multi-modal foundation models into three major paradigms: vision-language, vision-knowledge graph, and vision-gene expression. We further divide vision-language models into non-LLM-based and LLM-based approaches. Additionally, we analyze 28 available multi-modal datasets tailored for pathology, grouped into image-text pairs, instruction datasets, and image-other modality pairs. Our survey also presents a taxonomy of downstream tasks, highlights training and evaluation strategies, and identifies key challenges and future directions. We aim for this survey to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of pathology and AI.