# SLAM-AGS: Slide-Label Aware Multi-Task Pretraining Using Adaptive Gradient Surgery in Computational Cytology

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14639/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Multi-Task Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04650/) (2018)
- [Conflict-Averse Gradient Descent for Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14048/) (2021)
- [DTFD-MIL: Double-Tier Feature Distillation Multiple Instance Learning for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12081/) (2022)
- [Multiple Instance Learning via Iterative Self-Paced Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09452/) (2022)
- [WeakSupCon: Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Encoder Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04165/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computational cytology faces two major challenges: i) instance-level labels are unreliable and prohibitively costly to obtain, ii) witness rates are extremely low. We propose SLAM-AGS, a Slide-Label-Aware Multitask pretraining framework that jointly optimizes (i) a weakly supervised similarity objective on slide-negative patches and (ii) a self-supervised contrastive objective on slide-positive patches, yielding stronger performance on downstream tasks. To stabilize learning, we apply Adaptive Gradient Surgery to tackle conflicting task gradients and prevent model collapse. We integrate the pretrained encoder into an attention-based Multiple Instance Learning aggregator for bag-level prediction and attention-guided retrieval of the most abnormal instances in a bag. On a publicly available bone-marrow cytology dataset, with simulated witness rates from 10% down to 0.5%, SLAM-AGS improves bag-level F1-Score and Top 400 positive cell retrieval over other pretraining methods, with the largest gains at low witness rates, showing that resolving gradient interference enables stable pretraining and better performance on downstream tasks. To facilitate reproducibility, we share our complete implementation and evaluation framework as open source: https://github.com/Ace95/SLAM-AGS.