# CytoSPM: Open-Vocabulary Cytopathology Detection with Structured Prompt Bank

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31314 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31314/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [Octopus: Agentic Multimodal Reasoning with Six-Capability Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15351/) (2025)
- [LEDGERMIND: Provenance-Constrained Multimodal Agentic Reasoning with a Structured Evidence Ledger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28374/) (2026)
- [OV-DEIM: Real-time DETR-Style Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with GridSynthetic Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07022/) (2026)
- [Zero-Forgetting CISS via Dual-Phase Cognitive Cascades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13874/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cytopathology detection requires open-vocabulary recognition because cellular categories are fine-grained, long-tailed, and continuously evolving across different organ systems. However, existing cytology detectors are mostly single-domain and closed-set, and there is still no unified benchmark for evaluating open-vocabulary cytopathology detection. We present PentaCyto, a multi-domain benchmark covering cervical, urinary, respiratory, serous fluid, and thyroid cytology, with 24 base categories and 9 held-out novel categories. Each category is associated with structured cytomorphology prompts that describe diagnostic morphological attributes and provide clinically grounded textual knowledge. We further propose CytoSPM, an efficient detector based on a decoupled two-stage design. It first extracts reusable class-agnostic visual representations, and then performs class-aware structural prompt matching with class names and cytomorphology prompts. On PentaCyto, CytoSPM outperforms existing methods in novel-category detection and open-vocabulary detection while maintaining efficient inference.