# TICON: A Slide-Level Tile Contextualizer for Histopathology Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21331 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21331/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Computational Pathology on Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09666/) (2020)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)
- [Quilt-1M: One Million Image-Text Pairs for Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11207/) (2023)
- [AM-RADIO: Agglomerative Vision Foundation Model -- Reduce All Domains Into One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06709/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Whole Slide Foundation Model for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19666/) (2024)
- [Virchow2: Scaling Self-Supervised Mixed Magnification Models in Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00738/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Self-Supervised Learning on Diverse Pathology Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04690/) (2022)
- [HEST-1k: A Dataset for Spatial Transcriptomics and Histology Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16192/) (2024)
- [Virchow: A Million-Slide Digital Pathology Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07778/) (2023)
- [PRISM: A Multi-Modal Generative Foundation Model for Slide-Level Histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10254/) (2024)
- [Phikon-v2, A large and public feature extractor for biomarker prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09173/) (2024)
- [Feature Re-Embedding: Towards Foundation Model-Level Performance in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17228/) (2024)
- [A Clinical Benchmark of Public Self-Supervised Pathology Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06508/) (2024)
- [Accelerating Data Processing and Benchmarking of AI Models for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06750/) (2025)
- [Hibou: A Family of Foundational Vision Transformers for Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05074/) (2024)
- [Molecular-driven Foundation Model for Oncologic Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16652/) (2025)
- [Transcriptomics-guided Slide Representation Learning in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11618/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking foundation models as feature extractors for weakly-supervised computational pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15823/) (2024)
- [DUNE: Distilling a Universal Encoder from Heterogeneous 2D and 3D Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14405/) (2025)
- [Towards A Generalizable Pathology Foundation Model via Unified Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18449/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Patch Dependence for Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14391/) (2024)
- [Do Multiple Instance Learning Models Transfer?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09022/) (2025)
- [Multistain Pretraining for Slide Representation Learning in Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02859/) (2024)
- [UNIC: Universal Classification Models via Multi-teacher Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05088/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [MOOZY: A Patient-First Foundation Model for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27048/) (2026)
- [Unified Multi-Foundation-Model Slide Representation for Pan-Cancer Recognition and Text-Guided Tumor Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22846/) (2026)
- [Scaling Multi-Teacher Distillation for Digital Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12574/) (2026)
- [BigCell: Generating Gigapixel Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14261/) (2026)
- [Beyond Sparse Captions: Aligning Slide-Level Text and Patch-Level Vision in Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17233/) (2026)
- [Morphology-aware deep learning predicts colorectal cancer survival from whole-slide images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17603/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The interpretation of small tiles in large whole slide images (WSI) often needs a larger image context. We introduce TICON, a transformer-based tile representation contextualizer that produces rich, contextualized embeddings for ''any'' application in computational pathology. Standard tile encoder-based pipelines, which extract embeddings of tiles stripped from their context, fail to model the rich slide-level information essential for both local and global tasks. Furthermore, different tile-encoders excel at different downstream tasks. Therefore, a unified model is needed to contextualize embeddings derived from ''any'' tile-level foundation model. TICON addresses this need with a single, shared encoder, pretrained using a masked modeling objective to simultaneously unify and contextualize representations from diverse tile-level pathology foundation models. Our experiments demonstrate that TICON-contextualized embeddings significantly improve performance across many different tasks, establishing new state-of-the-art results on tile-level benchmarks (i.e., HEST-Bench, THUNDER, CATCH) and slide-level benchmarks (i.e., Patho-Bench). Finally, we pretrain an aggregator on TICON to form a slide-level foundation model, using only 11K WSIs, outperforming SoTA slide-level foundation models pretrained with up to 350K WSIs.