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TransMIL: Transformer based Correlated Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification

2 Jun 2021NeurIPS 2021 12arXiv:2106.00908archive 2025-07-28

Zhuchen Shao, Hao Bian, Yang Chen, Yifeng Wang, Jian Zhang, Xiangyang Ji, Yongbing Zhang

Multiple instance learning (MIL) is a powerful tool to solve the weakly supervised classification in whole slide image (WSI) based pathology diagnosis. However, the current MIL methods are usually based on independent and identical distribution hypothesis, thus neglect the correlation among different instances. To address this problem, we proposed a new framework, called correlated MIL, and provided a proof for convergence. Based on this framework, we devised a Transformer based MIL (TransMIL), which explored both morphological and spatial information. The proposed TransMIL can effectively deal with unbalanced/balanced and binary/multiple classification with great visualization and interpretability. We conducted various experiments for three different computational pathology problems and achieved better performance and faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art methods. The test AUC for the binary tumor classification can be up to 93.09% over CAMELYON16 dataset. And the AUC over the cancer subtypes classification can be up to 96.03% and 98.82% over TCGA-NSCLC dataset and TCGA-RCC dataset, respectively. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/szc19990412/TransMIL.

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Code

szc19990412/TransMIL officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
Xiyue-Wang/RetCCL mentioned on GitHubpytorchGPL-3.0 report
Ycblue/TransMIL mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

ClassificationImage ClassificationMultiple Instance LearningWeakly Supervised Classificationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Multiple Instance Learning CAMELYON16 TransMIL ACC 0.8837 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Multiple Instance Learning CAMELYON16 TransMIL AUC 0.9309 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Multiple Instance Learning TCGA TransMIL ACC 0.8835 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Multiple Instance Learning TCGA TransMIL AUC 0.9603 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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