AdaFusion: Prompt-Guided Inference with Adaptive Fusion of Pathology Foundation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Xiao, Yuxiang, Hu, Yang, Li, Bin, Zhang, Tianyang, Li, Zexi, Fu, Huazhu, Rittscher, Jens, Yang, Kaixiang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Xiao, Yuxiang
Hu, Yang
Li, Bin
Zhang, Tianyang
Li, Zexi
Fu, Huazhu
Rittscher, Jens
Yang, Kaixiang
author_facet Xiao, Yuxiang
Hu, Yang
Li, Bin
Zhang, Tianyang
Li, Zexi
Fu, Huazhu
Rittscher, Jens
Yang, Kaixiang
contents Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have demonstrated strong representational capabilities through self-supervised pre-training on large-scale, unannotated histopathology image datasets. However, their diverse yet opaque pretraining contexts, shaped by both data-related and structural/training factors, introduce latent biases that hinder generalisability and transparency in downstream applications. In this paper, we propose AdaFusion, a novel prompt-guided inference framework that, to our knowledge, is among the very first to dynamically integrate complementary knowledge from multiple PFMs. Our method compresses and aligns tile-level features from diverse models and employs a lightweight attention mechanism to adaptively fuse them based on tissue phenotype context. We evaluate AdaFusion on three real-world benchmarks spanning treatment response prediction, tumour grading, and spatial gene expression inference. Our approach consistently surpasses individual PFMs across both classification and regression tasks, while offering interpretable insights into each model's biosemantic specialisation. These results highlight AdaFusion's ability to bridge heterogeneous PFMs, achieving both enhanced performance and interpretability of model-specific inductive biases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05084
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AdaFusion: Prompt-Guided Inference with Adaptive Fusion of Pathology Foundation Models
Xiao, Yuxiang
Hu, Yang
Li, Bin
Zhang, Tianyang
Li, Zexi
Fu, Huazhu
Rittscher, Jens
Yang, Kaixiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have demonstrated strong representational capabilities through self-supervised pre-training on large-scale, unannotated histopathology image datasets. However, their diverse yet opaque pretraining contexts, shaped by both data-related and structural/training factors, introduce latent biases that hinder generalisability and transparency in downstream applications. In this paper, we propose AdaFusion, a novel prompt-guided inference framework that, to our knowledge, is among the very first to dynamically integrate complementary knowledge from multiple PFMs. Our method compresses and aligns tile-level features from diverse models and employs a lightweight attention mechanism to adaptively fuse them based on tissue phenotype context. We evaluate AdaFusion on three real-world benchmarks spanning treatment response prediction, tumour grading, and spatial gene expression inference. Our approach consistently surpasses individual PFMs across both classification and regression tasks, while offering interpretable insights into each model's biosemantic specialisation. These results highlight AdaFusion's ability to bridge heterogeneous PFMs, achieving both enhanced performance and interpretability of model-specific inductive biases.
title AdaFusion: Prompt-Guided Inference with Adaptive Fusion of Pathology Foundation Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05084