{"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/prompt-mil-boosting-multi-instance-learning","title":"Prompt-MIL: Boosting Multi-Instance Learning Schemes via Task-specific Prompt Tuning","arxiv_id":"2303.12214","date":"2023-03-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jingwei Zhang","Saarthak Kapse","Ke Ma","Prateek Prasanna","Joel Saltz","Maria Vakalopoulou","Dimitris Samaras"],"abstract":"Whole slide image (WSI) classification is a critical task in computational pathology, requiring the processing of gigapixel-sized images, which is challenging for current deep-learning methods. Current state of the art methods are based on multi-instance learning schemes (MIL), which usually rely on pretrained features to represent the instances. Due to the lack of task-specific annotated data, these features are either obtained from well-established backbones on natural images, or, more recently from self-supervised models pretrained on histopathology. However, both approaches yield task-agnostic features, resulting in performance loss compared to the appropriate task-related supervision, if available. In this paper, we show that when task-specific annotations are limited, we can inject such supervision into downstream task training, to reduce the gap between fully task-tuned and task agnostic features. We propose Prompt-MIL, an MIL framework that integrates prompts into WSI classification. Prompt-MIL adopts a prompt tuning mechanism, where only a small fraction of parameters calibrates the pretrained features to encode task-specific information, rather than the conventional full fine-tuning approaches. Extensive experiments on three WSI datasets, TCGA-BRCA, TCGA-CRC, and BRIGHT, demonstrate the superiority of Prompt-MIL over conventional MIL methods, achieving a relative improvement of 1.49%-4.03% in accuracy and 0.25%-8.97% in AUROC while using fewer than 0.3% additional parameters. Compared to conventional full fine-tuning approaches, we fine-tune less than 1.3% of the parameters, yet achieve a relative improvement of 1.29%-13.61% in accuracy and 3.22%-27.18% in AUROC and reduce GPU memory consumption by 38%-45% while training 21%-27% faster. Our code is available at https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/PromptMIL.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12214v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12214v2.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":"prompt-mil-boosting-multi-instance-learning","repo_url":"https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/promptmil","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.12214","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}