Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing whole slide images (WSIs). However, adapting these pretrained PFMs for specific clinical tasks presents considerable challenges, primarily due to the availability of only weak (WSI-level) labels for gigapixel images, necessitating multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigm for effective WSI analysis. This paper proposes a novel approach for single-GPU \textbf{T}ask \textbf{A}daptation of \textbf{PFM}s (TAPFM) that uses vision transformer (\vit) attention for MIL aggregation while optimizing both for feature representations and attention weights. The proposed approach maintains separate computational graphs for MIL aggregator and the PFM to create stable training dynamics that align with downstream task objectives during end-to-end adaptation. Evaluated on mutation prediction tasks for bladder cancer and lung adenocarcinoma across institutional and TCGA cohorts, TAPFM consistently outperforms conventional approaches, with H-Optimus-0 (TAPFM) outperforming the benchmarks. TAPFM effectively handles multi-label classification of actionable mutations as well. Thus, TAPFM makes adaptation of powerful pre-trained PFMs practical on standard hardware for various clinical applications.
View on arXiv@article{kumar2025_2506.05184,
title={ Single GPU Task Adaptation of Pathology Foundation Models for Whole Slide Image Analysis },
author={ Neeraj Kumar and Swaraj Nanda and Siddharth Singi and Jamal Benhamida and David Kim and Jie-Fu Chen and Amir Momeni-Boroujeni and Gregory M. Goldgof and Gabriele Campanella and Chad Vanderbilt },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.05184},
year={ 2025 }
}