AdaptMIL: Domain Adaptation for Multiple Instance Learning in Digital Pathology

Overview & Synopsis

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) support a wide range of histopathology tasks on whole-slide images through multiple instance learning (MIL). Despite recent progress, these models remain sensitive to cross-hospital distribution shifts: performance often degrades when a task head (e.g., classification) is trained on data from one hospital and then used on data from another hospital. To address this challenge, we propose AdaptMIL, a training strategy for integrating domain adaptation into MIL training. AdaptMIL is motivated by our finding that directly applying domain adaptation objectives during MIL training can interfere with MIL aggregation learning, often resulting in performance degradation over standard training. AdaptMIL resolves this by decoupling representation-level domain alignment learning from MIL aggregation learning through a two-stage training procedure. We show that AdaptMIL improves cross-hospital performance and outperforms alternative adaptation methods across experiments spanning multiple WSI datasets, tasks, PFMs, MIL architectures, and domain adaptation objectives. AdaptMIL's code will be released upon publication.