{"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/self-supervised-vision-transformers-learn","title":"Self-Supervised Vision Transformers Learn Visual Concepts in Histopathology","arxiv_id":"2203.00585","date":"2022-03-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Richard J. Chen","Rahul G. Krishnan"],"abstract":"Tissue phenotyping is a fundamental task in learning objective characterizations of histopathologic biomarkers within the tumor-immune microenvironment in cancer pathology. However, whole-slide imaging (WSI) is a complex computer vision in which: 1) WSIs have enormous image resolutions with precludes large-scale pixel-level efforts in data curation, and 2) diversity of morphological phenotypes results in inter- and intra-observer variability in tissue labeling. To address these limitations, current efforts have proposed using pretrained image encoders (transfer learning from ImageNet, self-supervised pretraining) in extracting morphological features from pathology, but have not been extensively validated. In this work, we conduct a search for good representations in pathology by training a variety of self-supervised models with validation on a variety of weakly-supervised and patch-level tasks. Our key finding is in discovering that Vision Transformers using DINO-based knowledge distillation are able to learn data-efficient and interpretable features in histology images wherein the different attention heads learn distinct morphological phenotypes. We make evaluation code and pretrained weights publicly-available at: https://github.com/Richarizardd/Self-Supervised-ViT-Path.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.00585v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.00585v1.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":"self-supervised-vision-transformers-learn","repo_url":"https://github.com/richarizardd/self-supervised-vit-path","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"GPL-3.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"knowledge-distillation","task_name":"Knowledge Distillation"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"knowledge-distillation","method_name":"Knowledge Distillation"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2203.00585","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}