{"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/cluster-to-conquer-a-framework-for-end-to-end","title":"Cluster-to-Conquer: A Framework for End-to-End Multi-Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification","arxiv_id":"2103.10626","date":"2021-03-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yash Sharma","Aman Shrivastava","Lubaina Ehsan","Christopher A. Moskaluk","Sana Syed","Donald E. Brown"],"abstract":"In recent years, the availability of digitized Whole Slide Images (WSIs) has enabled the use of deep learning-based computer vision techniques for automated disease diagnosis. However, WSIs present unique computational and algorithmic challenges. WSIs are gigapixel-sized ($\\sim$100K pixels), making them infeasible to be used directly for training deep neural networks. Also, often only slide-level labels are available for training as detailed annotations are tedious and can be time-consuming for experts. Approaches using multiple-instance learning (MIL) frameworks have been shown to overcome these challenges. Current state-of-the-art approaches divide the learning framework into two decoupled parts: a convolutional neural network (CNN) for encoding the patches followed by an independent aggregation approach for slide-level prediction. In this approach, the aggregation step has no bearing on the representations learned by the CNN encoder. We have proposed an end-to-end framework that clusters the patches from a WSI into ${k}$-groups, samples ${k}'$ patches from each group for training, and uses an adaptive attention mechanism for slide level prediction; Cluster-to-Conquer (C2C). We have demonstrated that dividing a WSI into clusters can improve the model training by exposing it to diverse discriminative features extracted from the patches. We regularized the clustering mechanism by introducing a KL-divergence loss between the attention weights of patches in a cluster and the uniform distribution. The framework is optimized end-to-end on slide-level cross-entropy, patch-level cross-entropy, and KL-divergence loss (Implementation: https://github.com/YashSharma/C2C).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.10626v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.10626v2.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":"cluster-to-conquer-a-framework-for-end-to-end","repo_url":"https://github.com/YashSharma/C2C","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"},{"task_slug":"whole-slide-images","task_name":"whole slide images"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2103.10626","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2103.10626","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2103.10626"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+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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