# IMPLICITSTAINER: Resolution Agnostic Data-Efficient Virtual Staining Using Neural Implicit Functions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09831 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09831/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Learning Continuous Image Representation with Local Implicit Image Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09161/) (2020)
- [Tackling the Generative Learning Trilemma with Denoising Diffusion GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07804/) (2021)
- [Axial Attention in Multidimensional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12180/) (2019)
- [BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07680/) (2022)
- [UniT: Multimodal Multitask Learning with a Unified Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10772/) (2021)
- [U-GAT-IT: Unsupervised Generative Attentional Networks with Adaptive Layer-Instance Normalization for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10830/) (2019)
- [EGSDE: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Energy-Guided Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06635/) (2022)
- [Seeing What a GAN Cannot Generate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11626/) (2019)
- [Image Generators with Conditionally-Independent Pixel Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13775/) (2020)
- [Global Context Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09959/) (2022)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Neural Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15086/) (2023)
- [Bias and Generalization in Deep Generative Models: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03259/) (2018)
- [Diversity-Sensitive Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09024/) (2019)
- [AttentionGAN: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11897/) (2019)
- [Unifying Diffusion Models' Latent Space, with Applications to CycleDiffusion and Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05559/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained slides are central to cancer diagnosis and monitoring, visualizing tissue architecture and cellular morphology. However, H&E lacks the molecular specificity needed to distinguish cell states and functional activation. Antibody-based stains, such as immunohistochemistry (IHC), are therefore required to identify specific phenotypes (e.g., CD3^+ T cells or HER2-positive tumor cells) but are costly, time-consuming, and not universally available. Deep learning-based image translation methods, often termed virtual staining, offer a complementary alternative by generating virtual immunostains directly from H&E images. Most existing virtual staining methods are patch-based and operate at fixed resolutions, often requiring large datasets and additional post-hoc super-resolution models to generate high-resolution images. Furthermore, GAN- and diffusion-based approaches introduce stochasticity into generated stains which, although beneficial for visual realism in natural images, can lead to hallucinations and structural distortions that affect the accuracy and reliability required for clinical use. We propose IMPLICITSTAINER, a deterministic framework that reformulates virtual staining as a continuous pixel-level translation problem. In contrast to existing patch-based approaches, IMPLICITSTAINER formulates image translation as a continuous spatial mapping using neural implicit deep learning models. Each target-domain (IHC) pixel is predicted from a high-dimensional embedding of the corresponding source-domain H&E pixel, its local spatial neighborhood, and explicit coordinate information. IMPLICITSTAINER enables resolution-agnostic inference, improves robustness in low-data regimes, and yields deterministic, reproducible outputs. Across more than twenty baselines, IMPLICITSTAINER achieves SOTA performance on virtual staining tasks, including IHC and mIF.