# InfoDPP-PAC: Principled Patch Selection for Whole Slide Image Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23574 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23574/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to Gigapixel Images via Hierarchical Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02647/) (2022)
- [DTFD-MIL: Double-Tier Feature Distillation Multiple Instance Learning for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12081/) (2022)
- [Revisiting the Nystrom Method for Improved Large-Scale Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.1849/) (2013)
- [HISTAI: An Open-Source, Large-Scale Whole Slide Image Dataset for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12120/) (2025)
- [Dual Attention Model with Reinforcement Learning for Classification of Histology Whole-Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09682/) (2023)
- [DPPMask: Masked Image Modeling with Determinantal Point Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12736/) (2023)
- [EvoPS: Evolutionary Patch Selection for Whole Slide Image Analysis in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07560/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Each WSI slide contains thousands of candidate tissue patches, while supervision is usually available only at slide level. Existing bag-construction strategies like Uniform extraction and handcrafted heuristics do not control redundancy while attention-based multiple-instance models couple patch importance to a particular downstream classifier, and coreset methods optimise embedding-space coverage without modelling task-relevant patch quality. We introduce InfoDPP-PAC, a principled patch-selection framework that combines teacher-seeded Gaussian process relevance modelling, determinantal log-determinant diversity,submodular greedy optimisation, and a concentration-based adaptive stopping rule. The main theoretical result shows that the log-determinant diversity term used in DPP-style selection is the Gaussian process mutual information between a selected subset and the latent relevance function. We further derive a PAC-style certificate for residual information gain, allowing the number of retained patches to vary by slide rather than being fixed a priori. The empirical study evaluates whether the selected subset is diverse, spatially and morphologically covering, non-redundant, and enriched for the teacher-derived relevance signal. It does not claim end-to-end diagnostic improvement after retraining a downstream MIL model. On 202 HISTAI gastrointestinal whole-slide images, the adaptive rule uses 83.7% fewer patches on average than a fixed full budget while retaining 97.9% of full-budget composite selection quality. At a matched budget, InfoDPP-PAC achieves the highest mean teacher-derived relevance score among fourteen baselines, with diversity and composite scores close to the strongest coreset methods. The results support InfoDPP-PAC as a controlled quality-diversity-cardinality selection framework, rather than as a downstream clinical predictor.
