{"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/scorenet-learning-non-uniform-attention-and","title":"ScoreNet: Learning Non-Uniform Attention and Augmentation for Transformer-Based Histopathological Image Classification","arxiv_id":"2202.07570","date":"2022-02-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Thomas Stegmüller","Behzad Bozorgtabar","Antoine Spahr","Jean-Philippe Thiran"],"abstract":"Progress in digital pathology is hindered by high-resolution images and the prohibitive cost of exhaustive localized annotations. The commonly used paradigm to categorize pathology images is patch-based processing, which often incorporates multiple instance learning (MIL) to aggregate local patch-level representations yielding image-level prediction. Nonetheless, diagnostically relevant regions may only take a small fraction of the whole tissue, and current MIL-based approaches often process images uniformly, discarding the inter-patches interactions. To alleviate these issues, we propose ScoreNet, a new efficient transformer that exploits a differentiable recommendation stage to extract discriminative image regions and dedicate computational resources accordingly. The proposed transformer leverages the local and global attention of a few dynamically recommended high-resolution regions at an efficient computational cost. We further introduce a novel mixing data-augmentation, namely ScoreMix, by leveraging the image's semantic distribution to guide the data mixing and produce coherent sample-label pairs. ScoreMix is embarrassingly simple and mitigates the pitfalls of previous augmentations, which assume a uniform semantic distribution and risk mislabeling the samples. Thorough experiments and ablation studies on three breast cancer histology datasets of Haematoxylin & Eosin (H&E) have validated the superiority of our approach over prior arts, including transformer-based models on tumour regions-of-interest (TRoIs) classification. ScoreNet equipped with proposed ScoreMix augmentation demonstrates better generalization capabilities and achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with only 50% of the data compared to other mixing augmentation variants. Finally, ScoreNet yields high efficacy and outperforms SOTA efficient transformers, namely TransPath and SwinTransformer.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07570v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.07570v3.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":"scorenet-learning-non-uniform-attention-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/stegmuel/ScoreNet","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"data-augmentation","task_name":"Data Augmentation"},{"task_slug":"domain-generalization","task_name":"Domain Generalization"},{"task_slug":"histopathological-image-classification","task_name":"Histopathological Image Classification"},{"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":"mixup","method_name":"Mixup"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}