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Fengtao Zhou

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4 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Revisiting End-to-End Learning with Slide-level Supervision in Computational Pathology

Wenhao Tang
Rong Qin
Heng Fang
Fengtao Zhou
Hao Chen
Xiang Li
Ming-Ming Cheng

Pre-trained encoders for offline feature extraction followed by multiple instance learning (MIL) aggregators have become the dominant paradigm in computational pathology (CPath), benefiting cancer diagnosis and prognosis. However, performance limitations arise from the absence of encoder fine-tuning for downstream tasks and disjoint optimization with MIL. While slide-level supervised end-to-end (E2E) learning is an intuitive solution to this issue, it faces challenges such as high computational demands and suboptimal results. These limitations motivate us to revisit E2E learning. We argue that prior work neglects inherent E2E optimization challenges, leading to performance disparities compared to traditional two-stage methods. In this paper, we pioneer the elucidation of optimization challenge caused by sparse-attention MIL and propose a novel MIL called ABMILX. ABMILX mitigates this problem through global correlation-based attention refinement and multi-head mechanisms. With the efficient multi-scale random patch sampling strategy, an E2E trained ResNet with ABMILX surpasses SOTA foundation models under the two-stage paradigm across multiple challenging benchmarks, while remaining computationally efficient ($<$ 10 RTX3090 GPU hours). We demonstrate the potential of E2E learning in CPath and calls for greater research focus in this area. The code is https: //github. com/DearCaat/E2E-WSI-ABMILX.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Post-hoc Part-Prototype Networks

Andong Tan
Fengtao Zhou
Hao Chen 0011

Post-hoc explainability methods such as Grad-CAM are popular because they do not influence the performance of a trained model. However, they mainly reveal ”where” a model looks at for a given input, fail to explain ”what” the model looks for (e. g. , what is important to classify a bird image to a Scott Oriole?). Existing part-prototype networks leverage part-prototypes (e. g. , characteristic Scott Oriole’s wing and head) to answer both ”where" and ”what", but often under-perform their black box counterparts in the accuracy. Therefore, a natural question is: can one construct a network that answers both ”where” and ”what" in a post-hoc manner to guarantee the model’s performance? To this end, we propose the first post-hoc part-prototype network via decomposing the classification head of a trained model into a set of interpretable part-prototypes. Concretely, we propose an unsupervised prototype discovery and refining strategy to obtain prototypes that can precisely reconstruct the classification head, yet being interpretable. Besides guaranteeing the performance, we show that our network offers more faithful explanations qualitatively and yields even better part-prototypes quantitatively than prior part-prototype networks.

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IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Boosting Multi-Label Image Classification with Complementary Parallel Self-Distillation

Jiazhi Xu
Sheng Huang
Fengtao Zhou
Luwen Huangfu
Daniel Zeng
Bo Liu

Multi-Label Image Classification (MLIC) appro-aches usually exploit label correlations to achieve good performance. However, emphasizing correlation like co-occurrence may overlook discriminative features and lead to model overfitting. In this study, we propose a generic framework named Parallel Self-Distillation (PSD) for boosting MLIC models. PSD decomposes the original MLIC task into several simpler MLIC sub-tasks via two elaborated complementary task decomposition strategies named Co-occurrence Graph Partition (CGP) and Dis-occurrence Graph Partition (DGP). Then, the MLIC models of fewer categories are trained with these sub-tasks in parallel for respectively learning the joint patterns and the category-specific patterns of labels. Finally, knowledge distillation is leveraged to learn a compact global ensemble of full categories with these learned patterns for reconciling the label correlation exploitation and model overfitting. Extensive results on MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE datasets demonstrate that our framework can be easily plugged into many MLIC approaches and improve performances of recent state-of-the-art approaches. The source code is released at https: //github. com/Robbie-Xu/CPSD.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Deep Semantic Dictionary Learning for Multi-label Image Classification

Fengtao Zhou
Sheng Huang
Yun Xing

Compared with single-label image classification, multi-label image classification is more practical and challenging. Some recent studies attempted to leverage the semantic information of categories for improving multi-label image classification performance. However, these semantic-based methods only take semantic information as type of complements for visual representation without further exploitation. In this paper, we present an innovative path towards the solution of the multi-label image classification which considers it as a dictionary learning task. A novel end-to-end model named Deep Semantic Dictionary Learning (DSDL) is designed. In DSDL, an auto-encoder is applied to generate the semantic dictionary from class-level semantics and then such dictionary is utilized for representing the visual features extracted by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with label embeddings. The DSDL provides a simple but elegant way to exploit and reconcile the label, semantic and visual spaces simultaneously via conducting the dictionary learning among them. Moreover, inspired by iterative optimization of traditional dictionary learning, we further devise a novel training strategy named Alternately Parameters Update Strategy (APUS) for optimizing DSDL, which alternately optimizes the representation coefficients and the semantic dictionary in forward and backward propagation. Extensive experimental results on three popular benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves promising performances in comparison with the state-of-the-arts. Our codes and models have been released1.

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