Sparse Task Vector Mixup with Hypernetworks for Efficient Knowledge Transfer in Whole-Slide Image Prognosis

Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) are widely used for estimating the prognosis of cancer patients. Current studies generally follow a cancer-specific learning paradigm. However, the available training samples for one cancer type are usually scarce in pathology. Consequently, the model often struggles to learn generalizable knowledge, thus performing worse on the tumor samples with inherent high heterogeneity. Although multi-cancer joint learning and knowledge transfer approaches have been explored recently to address it, they either rely on large-scale joint training or extensive inference across multiple models, posing new challenges in computational efficiency. To this end, this paper proposes a new scheme, Sparse Task Vector Mixup with Hypernetworks (STEPH). Unlike previous ones, it efficiently absorbs generalizable knowledge from other cancers for the target via model merging: i) applying task vector mixup to each source-target pair and then ii) sparsely aggregating task vector mixtures to obtain an improved target model, driven by hypernetworks. Extensive experiments on 13 cancer datasets show that STEPH improves over cancer-specific learning and an existing knowledge transfer baseline by 5.14% and 2.01%, respectively. Moreover, it is a more efficient solution for learning prognostic knowledge from other cancers, without requiring large-scale joint training or extensive multi-model inference. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/liupei101/STEPH.