{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/attention-challenging-multiple-instance","title":"Attention-Challenging Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification","arxiv_id":"2311.07125","date":"2023-11-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yunlong Zhang","Honglin Li","Yuxuan Sun","Sunyi Zheng","Chenglu Zhu","Lin Yang"],"abstract":"In the application of Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods for Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification, attention mechanisms often focus on a subset of discriminative instances, which are closely linked to overfitting. To mitigate overfitting, we present Attention-Challenging MIL (ACMIL). ACMIL combines two techniques based on separate analyses for attention value concentration. Firstly, UMAP of instance features reveals various patterns among discriminative instances, with existing attention mechanisms capturing only some of them. To remedy this, we introduce Multiple Branch Attention (MBA) to capture more discriminative instances using multiple attention branches. Secondly, the examination of the cumulative value of Top-K attention scores indicates that a tiny number of instances dominate the majority of attention. In response, we present Stochastic Top-K Instance Masking (STKIM), which masks out a portion of instances with Top-K attention values and allocates their attention values to the remaining instances. The extensive experimental results on three WSI datasets with two pre-trained backbones reveal that our ACMIL outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, through heatmap visualization and UMAP visualization, this paper extensively illustrates ACMIL's effectiveness in suppressing attention value concentration and overcoming the overfitting challenge. The source code is available at \\url{https://github.com/dazhangyu123/ACMIL}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07125v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.07125v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"attention-challenging-multiple-instance","repo_url":"https://github.com/dazhangyu123/acmil","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"multiple-instance-learning","task_name":"Multiple Instance Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"branch-attention","method_name":"Branch attention"},{"method_slug":"focus","method_name":"Focus"},{"method_slug":"heatmap","method_name":"Heatmap"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2311.07125","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2311.07125"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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