# Adaptive Learning Strategies for Mitotic Figure Classification in MIDOG2025 Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02640 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02640/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Mitosis domain generalization in histopathology images -- The MIDOG challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03742/) (2022)
- [Predicting breast tumor proliferation from whole-slide images: the TUPAC16 challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08284/) (2018)
- [Histologic Dataset of Normal and Atypical Mitotic Figures on Human Breast Cancer (AMi-Br)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04467/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Deep Learning and Vision Foundation Models for Atypical vs. Normal Mitosis Classification with Cross-Dataset Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21444/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Atypical mitotic figures (AMFs) are clinically relevant indicators of abnormal cell division, yet their reliable detection remains challenging due to morphological ambiguity and scanner variability. In this work, we investigated three variants of adapting the pathology foundation model UNI2 for the MIDOG2025 Track 2 challenge: (1) LoRA + UNI2, (2) VPT + UNI2 + Vahadane Normalizer, and (3) VPT + UNI2 + GRL + Stain TTA. We observed that the integration of Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) with stain normalization techniques contributed to improved generalization. The best robustness was achieved by further incorporating test-time augmentation (TTA) with Vahadane and Macenko stain normalization. Our final submission achieved a balanced accuracy of 0.8837 and an ROC-AUC of 0.9513 on the preliminary leaderboard, ranking within the top 10 teams. These results suggest that prompt-based adaptation combined with stain-normalization TTA offers a promising strategy for atypical mitosis classification under diverse imaging conditions.
