# LLM-driven Knowledge Enhancement for Multimodal Cancer Survival Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14594/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Publicly Available Clinical BERT Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03323/) (2019)
- [Self-Normalizing Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02515/) (2017)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Nystr"omformer: A Nystr"om-Based Algorithm for Approximating Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03902/) (2021)
- [Machine Learning for Survival Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04649/) (2017)
- [Modeling Dense Multimodal Interactions Between Biological Pathways and Histology for Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06819/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Optimal Transport-based Co-Attention Transformer with Global Structure Consistency for Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08330/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal Translation and Alignment for Survival Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12855/) (2023)
- [A Multimodal Knowledge-enhanced Whole-slide Pathology Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15362/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Prototyping for cancer survival prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00224/) (2024)
- [HistGen: Histopathology Report Generation via Local-Global Feature Encoding and Cross-modal Context Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05396/) (2024)
- [Prototypical Information Bottlenecking and Disentangling for Multimodal Cancer Survival Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01646/) (2024)
- [PathGen-1.6M: 1.6 Million Pathology Image-text Pairs Generation through Multi-agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00203/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current multimodal survival prediction methods typically rely on pathology images (WSIs) and genomic data, both of which are high-dimensional and redundant, making it difficult to extract discriminative features from them and align different modalities. Moreover, using a simple survival follow-up label is insufficient to supervise such a complex task. To address these challenges, we propose KEMM, an LLM-driven Knowledge-Enhanced Multimodal Model for cancer survival prediction, which integrates expert reports and prognostic background knowledge. 1) Expert reports, provided by pathologists on a case-by-case basis and refined by large language model (LLM), offer succinct and clinically focused diagnostic statements. This information may typically suggest different survival outcomes. 2) Prognostic background knowledge (PBK), generated concisely by LLM, provides valuable prognostic background knowledge on different cancer types, which also enhances survival prediction. To leverage these knowledge, we introduce the knowledge-enhanced cross-modal (KECM) attention module. KECM can effectively guide the network to focus on discriminative and survival-relevant features from highly redundant modalities. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that KEMM achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code will be released upon acceptance.