WeakSupCon: Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Encoder Pre-training

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Bodong, Manoochehri, Hamid, Li, Xiwen, Knudsen, Beatrice S., Tasdizen, Tolga
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Bodong
Manoochehri, Hamid
Li, Xiwen
Knudsen, Beatrice S.
Tasdizen, Tolga
author_facet Zhang, Bodong
Manoochehri, Hamid
Li, Xiwen
Knudsen, Beatrice S.
Tasdizen, Tolga
contents Weakly supervised multiple instance learning (MIL) is a challenging task given that only bag-level labels are provided, while each bag typically contains multiple instances. This topic has been extensively studied in histopathological image analysis, where labels are usually available only at the whole slide image (WSI) level, while each WSI could be divided into thousands of small image patches for training. The dominant MIL approaches focus on feature aggregation and take fixed patch features as inputs. However, weakly supervised feature representation learning in MIL settings is always neglected. Those features used to be generated by self-supervised learning methods that do not utilize weak labels, or by foundation encoders pre-trained on other large datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised feature representation learning method called Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning (WeakSupCon) that utilizes bag-level labels. In our method, we employ multi-task learning and define distinct contrastive losses for samples with different bag labels. Our experiments demonstrate that the features generated using WeakSupCon with limited computing resources significantly enhance MIL classification performance compared to self-supervised approaches across three datasets. Our WeakSupCon code is available at github.com/BzhangURU/Paper_WeakSupCon
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04165
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WeakSupCon: Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Encoder Pre-training
Zhang, Bodong
Manoochehri, Hamid
Li, Xiwen
Knudsen, Beatrice S.
Tasdizen, Tolga
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Weakly supervised multiple instance learning (MIL) is a challenging task given that only bag-level labels are provided, while each bag typically contains multiple instances. This topic has been extensively studied in histopathological image analysis, where labels are usually available only at the whole slide image (WSI) level, while each WSI could be divided into thousands of small image patches for training. The dominant MIL approaches focus on feature aggregation and take fixed patch features as inputs. However, weakly supervised feature representation learning in MIL settings is always neglected. Those features used to be generated by self-supervised learning methods that do not utilize weak labels, or by foundation encoders pre-trained on other large datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised feature representation learning method called Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning (WeakSupCon) that utilizes bag-level labels. In our method, we employ multi-task learning and define distinct contrastive losses for samples with different bag labels. Our experiments demonstrate that the features generated using WeakSupCon with limited computing resources significantly enhance MIL classification performance compared to self-supervised approaches across three datasets. Our WeakSupCon code is available at github.com/BzhangURU/Paper_WeakSupCon
title WeakSupCon: Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Encoder Pre-training
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04165