# UAM: A Unified Attention-Mamba Backbone of Multimodal Framework for Tumor Cell Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17355 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17355/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Mamba for medical image analysis, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 24 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Mamba for medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/mamba-for-medical-image-analysis/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [Jamba: A Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19887/) (2024)
- [VM-UNet: Vision Mamba UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02491/) (2024)
- [Long Range Language Modeling via Gated State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13947/) (2022)
- [BiomedParse: a biomedical foundation model for image parsing of everything everywhere all at once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12971/) (2024)
- [Jamba-1.5: Hybrid Transformer-Mamba Models at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12570/) (2024)
- [WSSS4LUAD: Grand Challenge on Weakly-supervised Tissue Semantic Segmentation for Lung Adenocarcinoma](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06455/) (2022)
- [Mamba as a Bridge: Where Vision Foundation Models Meet Vision Language Models for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03193/) (2025)
- [Trajectory Mamba: Efficient Attention-Mamba Forecasting Model Based on Selective SSM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10898/) (2025)
- [Binarized Mamba-Transformer for Lightweight Quad Bayer HybridEVS Demosaicing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16134/) (2025)
- [TYrPPG: Uncomplicated and Enhanced Learning Capability rPPG for Remote Heart Rate Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05833/) (2025)

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

- [Learning from Reliable Latent Prompts for Visual Recognition with Missing Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30597/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inspired by the recent success of the Mamba architecture in vision and language domains, we introduce a Unified Attention-Mamba (UAM) backbone. Unlike previous hybrid approaches that integrate Attention and Mamba modules in fixed proportions, our unified design flexibly combines their capabilities within a single cohesive architecture, eliminating the need for manual ratio tuning and improving encode capability. We develop two UAM variants to comprehensively evaluate the benefits of this unified structure. Building on this backbone, we further propose a multimodal UAM framework that jointly performs cell-level classification and image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that UAM achieves state-of-the-art performance across both tasks on public benchmarks, surpassing leading image-based foundation models. It improves cell classification accuracy from 74% to 78% (n=349,882 cells), and tumor segmentation precision from 75% to 80% (n=406 patches).