# LPD: Learnable Prototypes with Diversity Regularization for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05922 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05922/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [This Looks Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10574/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Image-specific Prototype Exploration for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02909/) (2022)
- [Class Re-Activation Maps for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00962/) (2022)
- [Multi-Layer Pseudo-Supervision for Histopathology Tissue Semantic Segmentation using Patch-level Classification Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08048/) (2021)
- [ProtoSeg: Interpretable Semantic Segmentation with Prototypical Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12276/) (2023)
- [ViLa-MIL: Dual-scale Vision-Language Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08391/) (2025)
- [Prototype-Based Image Prompting for Weakly Supervised Histopathological Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12068/) (2025)
- [Hunting Attributes: Context Prototype-Aware Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07630/) (2024)
- [Online Easy Example Mining for Weakly-supervised Gland Segmentation from Histology Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06665/) (2022)
- [CP-Net: Contour-Perturbed Reconstruction Network for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08215/) (2022)
- [Question-Answer Cross Language Image Matching for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09883/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DualProtoSeg: Simple and Efficient Design with Text- and Image-Guided Prototype Learning for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10314/) (2025)
- [ConStruct: Structural Distillation of Foundation Models for Prototype-Based Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10316/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) in histopathology reduces pixel-level labeling by learning from image-level labels, but it is hindered by inter-class homogeneity, intra-class heterogeneity, and CAM-induced region shrinkage (global pooling-based class activation maps whose activations highlight only the most distinctive areas and miss nearby class regions). Recent works address these challenges by constructing a clustering prototype bank and then refining masks in a separate stage; however, such two-stage pipelines are costly, sensitive to hyperparameters, and decouple prototype discovery from segmentation learning, limiting their effectiveness and efficiency. We propose a cluster-free, one-stage learnable-prototype framework with diversity regularization to enhance morphological intra-class heterogeneity coverage. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on BCSS-WSSS, outperforming prior methods in mIoU and mDice. Qualitative segmentation maps show sharper boundaries and fewer mislabels, and activation heatmaps further reveal that, compared with clustering-based prototypes, our learnable prototypes cover more diverse and complementary regions within each class, providing consistent qualitative evidence for their effectiveness.