# MExD: An Expert-Infused Diffusion Model for Whole-Slide Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12401 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12401/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 40 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)
- Mixture-of-experts / [Vision mixture-of-experts](https://mlsanity.com/moe/vision-mixture-of-experts/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [On the Variance of the Adaptive Learning Rate and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03265/) (2019)
- [Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Computational Pathology on Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09666/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DTFD-MIL: Double-Tier Feature Distillation Multiple Instance Learning for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12081/) (2022)
- [Predict Responsibly: Improving Fairness and Accuracy by Learning to Defer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06664/) (2017)
- [Evaluating Bayesian Deep Learning Methods for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12709/) (2018)
- [BRACS: A Dataset for BReAst Carcinoma Subtyping in H&E Histology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04740/) (2021)
- [Visual Commonsense R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12204/) (2020)
- [DiffuseVAE: Efficient, Controllable and High-Fidelity Generation from Low-Dimensional Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00308/) (2022)
- [CARD: Classification and Regression Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07275/) (2022)
- [Interventional Bag Multi-Instance Learning On Whole-Slide Pathological Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06873/) (2023)
- [MambaMIL: Enhancing Long Sequence Modeling with Sequence Reordering in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06800/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Graph Representation with Knowledge-aware Attention for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07719/) (2024)
- [Towards Generalizable Tumor Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19470/) (2024)
- [Attention-Challenging Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07125/) (2023)
- [Multiple Instance Learning Framework with Masked Hard Instance Mining for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15254/) (2023)
- [Task-Customized Mixture of Adapters for General Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12494/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Adversarial Representation Learning for Self-supervised Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14566/) (2022)
- [Task-specific Fine-tuning via Variational Information Bottleneck for Weakly-supervised Pathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08446/) (2023)
- [DDM2: Self-Supervised Diffusion MRI Denoising with Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03018/) (2023)
- [Histopathology Whole Slide Image Analysis with Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04189/) (2023)
- [Differentiable Zooming for Multiple Instance Learning on Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12454/) (2022)
- [The Rise of AI Language Pathologists: Exploring Two-level Prompt Learning for Few-shot Weakly-supervised Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17891/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SegMoTE: Token-Level Mixture of Experts for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19213/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification poses unique challenges due to the vast image size and numerous non-informative regions, which introduce noise and cause data imbalance during feature aggregation. To address these issues, we propose MExD, an Expert-Infused Diffusion Model that combines the strengths of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism with a diffusion model for enhanced classification. MExD balances patch feature distribution through a novel MoE-based aggregator that selectively emphasizes relevant information, effectively filtering noise, addressing data imbalance, and extracting essential features. These features are then integrated via a diffusion-based generative process to directly yield the class distribution for the WSI. Moving beyond conventional discriminative approaches, MExD represents the first generative strategy in WSI classification, capturing fine-grained details for robust and precise results. Our MExD is validated on three widely-used benchmarks-Camelyon16, TCGA-NSCLC, and BRACS consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance in both binary and multi-class tasks.