# Multi-Teacher Contrastive Distillation for Edge-Efficient Pathology Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05533 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05533/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06349/) (2015)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.5298/) (2014)
- [Importance Weighted Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00519/) (2015)
- [Wasserstein Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.01558/) (2017)
- [VAE with a VampPrior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07120/) (2017)
- [Cyclical Annealing Schedule: A Simple Approach to Mitigating KL Vanishing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10145/) (2019)
- [Variational Mixture-of-Experts Autoencoders for Multi-Modal Deep Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03393/) (2019)
- [Variational Lossy Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02731/) (2016)
- [Expectation Propagation for approximate Bayesian inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2294/) (2013)
- [Lagging Inference Networks and Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05534/) (2019)
- [Don't Blame the ELBO! A Linear VAE Perspective on Posterior Collapse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02469/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Variational Bayes: Unifying Variational Autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04722/) (2017)
- [Preventing Posterior Collapse with delta-VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03416/) (2019)
- [PixelVAE: A Latent Variable Model for Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05013/) (2016)
- [Distribution Matching in Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06847/) (2018)
- [Learning Dynamics in Linear VAE: Posterior Collapse Threshold, Superfluous Latent Space Pitfalls, and Speedup with KL Annealing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15440/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computational pathology foundation models (PFMs) have advanced whole-slide image analysis. However, their size and inference cost hinder local deployment in pathology departments. We propose MuCoDi, a pretraining framework that distills frozen tile embeddings from multiple PFMs into compact edge-oriented encoders. Instead of regressing individual teacher features, MuCoDi trains lightweight MobileOne and RepViT students with a contrastive distillation objective adapted from MoCo v3, where cached Virchow2, UNI2, and H-Optimus-1 embeddings replace momentum-encoder keys. We pretrain students on 14.3M TCGA tiles from only 11.8K WSIs and evaluate frozen encoders on 23 clinically curated downstream classification tasks. RepViT-based MuCoEdge students retain near-teacher performance while reducing model size by orders of magnitude: MuCoEdge-R2.3 and MuCoEdge-R1.5 reach 71.0% external AUROC, within 0.8 percentage points of the best teacher (Virchow2, 71.8%), while MuCoEdge-R2.3 obtains the best external F1 and the second-best AUPRC (51.8% and 53.3%). MuCoEdge-R1.0 reaches 70.9% AUROC with only 6.4M parameters and 1.12 GFLOPs. On a Raspberry Pi 5, sub-million-parameter MobileOne students achieve up to 605-fold single-tile speedup over Virchow2 while retaining 66.5% to 66.9% external AUROC, demonstrating that PFM-quality pathology representations can be moved toward practical edge deployment. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/mucodi-6243.