# Dual-stream attention-guided learning for weakly supervised whole slide image classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23341 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23341/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Computational Pathology on Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09666/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)
- [Cross-Entropy Loss Functions: Theoretical Analysis and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07288/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Multiple Instance Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02501/) (2016)
- [Artificial Intelligence for Digital and Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06148/) (2023)
- [Interventional Bag Multi-Instance Learning On Whole-Slide Pathological Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06873/) (2023)
- [C-MIL: Continuation Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05647/) (2019)
- [Feature Re-Embedding: Towards Foundation Model-Level Performance in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17228/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Whole Slide Image Analysis: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11097/) (2019)
- [OCELOT: Overlapped Cell on Tissue Dataset for Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13110/) (2023)
- [AMIGO: Sparse Multi-Modal Graph Transformer with Shared-Context Processing for Representation Learning of Giga-pixel Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00865/) (2023)
- [Pan-cancer Histopathology WSI Pre-training with Position-aware Masked Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07504/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Whole slide images (WSIs) play a crucial role in cancer diagnosis due to their ultra-high resolution and rich morphological information, and multiple instance learning (MIL) has become a prevalent paradigm to solve the massive size of WSIs and the scarcity of fine-grained annotations of instance. However, most existing MIL methods struggle to accurately identify diagnostically critical local regions (instance) using only slide-level labels, and suffer from modelling the relationship of instances efficiently. To address these defects, we propose a Dual-Stream Attention-Guided Learning (DSAGL) framework. DSAGL bridges slide-level supervision and instance-level learning through a teacher-student dual-stream architecture, and mitigates instance ambiguity by generating attention-guided pseudo labels. The framework employs a shared lightweight encoder to efficiently model long-range dependencies and an attention-based fusion mechanism to enhance sensitivity to sparse, informative regions. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real-world pathological WSI datasets demonstrate that DSAGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MIL methods, achieving superior discriminative performance and robustness under weak supervision.