GroupMIL: Semantic Group Based Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Analysing

Abstract

Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis faces challenges due to gigapixel resolutions and slide-level weak supervision. Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) serves as a pivotal method for this task. However, existing MIL frameworks often fail to exploit the inherent redundancy of tissue patterns or the semantic coherence among similar patches within a WSI. We propose GroupMIL, a novel framework that introduces a differentiable grouping mechanism into the MIL framework. This approach enables the automatic emergence of semantic segments using only slide-level labels. We specifically introduce a multi-stage grouping block and a hierarchical aggregator, which progressively fuse features within and across groups to construct a robust slide-level representation. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets across cancer subtyping and survival prediction tasks demonstrate that GroupMIL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art performance.