# SlideMix: Enhancing Whole Slide Image Analysis via Multimodal Shuffling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00396 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00396/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00908/) (2021)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13178/) (2024)
- [Puzzle Mix: Exploiting Saliency and Local Statistics for Optimal Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06962/) (2020)
- [DTFD-MIL: Double-Tier Feature Distillation Multiple Instance Learning for Histopathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12081/) (2022)
- [MambaMIL: Enhancing Long Sequence Modeling with Sequence Reordering in Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06800/) (2024)
- [ResizeMix: Mixing Data with Preserved Object Information and True Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11101/) (2020)
- [Taming Vision-Language Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18378/) (2025)
- [UnPuzzle: A Unified Framework for Pathology Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03152/) (2025)
- [CellMix: A General Instance Relationship based Method for Data Augmentation Towards Pathology Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11513/) (2023)
- [CPIA Dataset: A Comprehensive Pathological Image Analysis Dataset for Self-supervised Learning Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17902/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Histopathological whole slide images (WSIs) are central to cancer diagnosis, but their gigapixel scale, tissue heterogeneity, weak slide-level supervision, sparse diagnostic regions, and multi-scale evidence make robust automated analysis challenging. Multiple instance learning (MIL) is widely used to aggregate tile-level features into slide-level predictions, yet existing augmentation strategies often perturb tissue regions without preserving diagnostic relevance, slide context, or cross-scale structure. We propose SlideMix, a model-agnostic multimodal augmentation framework for MIL-based WSI analysis. SlideMix uses a retrieval-augmented vision-language model (VLM)-based Visual-Language Adaptive Region selector to identify diagnostically relevant regions and reduce weak-label noise. It then performs In-place Tile Shuffling within meaningful tissue regions to mix feature embeddings while preserving slide-level context. A VLM-based soft-labeling module supervises mixed samples, while a multi-factor, loss-driven online Curriculum-Learning Feedback scheme adaptively controls shuffle granularity, feature similarity, and shuffle ratio to promote cross-scale representation learning. Across 11 WSI datasets comprising 20,523 slides, 8 diagnostic tasks, and 10 WSI backbones, SlideMix improves accuracy and generalization in most settings and compares favorably with established augmentation baselines, providing a simple plug-and-play approach for more robust and scalable digital pathology models. Source code: https://github.com/Xia-Research-Lab/SlideMix