LadderMIL: Multiple-instance Learning with Coarse-to-Fine Self-Distillation

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) for whole slide image (WSI) analysis in computational pathology often neglects instance-level learning as supervision is typically provided only at the bag level, hindering the integrated consideration of instance and bag-level information during the analysis. In this work, we present LadderMIL, a framework designed to improve MIL through two perspectives: (1) employing instance-level supervision and (2) learning inter-instance contextual information at bag level. Firstly, we propose a novel Coarse-to-Fine Self-Distillation (CFSD) paradigm that probes and distils a network trained with bag-level information to adaptively obtain instance-level labels which could effectively provide the instance-level supervision for the same network in a self-improving way. Secondly, to capture inter-instance contextual information in WSI, we propose a Contextual Encoding Generator (CEG), which encodes the contextual appearance of instances within a bag. We also theoretically and empirically prove the instance-level learnability of CFSD. Our LadderMIL is evaluated on multiple clinically relevant benchmarking tasks including breast cancer receptor status classification, multi-class subtype classification, tumour classification, and prognosis prediction. By comparing with the best baseline, average improvements of 6.4%, 5.4% and 0.8% in AUC, F1-score, and concordance index (C-index) are demonstrated across the five benchmarks; while average improvements of 7.6% and 10.4% in AUC and F1-score are shown in the external validation cohort.