Paper
HiPath: Hierarchical Vision-Language Alignment for Structured Pathology Report Prediction
Authors
Ruicheng Yuan, Zhenxuan Zhang, Anbang Wang, Liwei Hu, Xiangqian Hua, Yaya Peng, Jiawei Luo, Guang Yang
Abstract
Pathology reports are structured, multi-granular documents encoding diagnostic conclusions, histological grades, and ancillary test results across one or more anatomical sites; yet existing pathology vision-language models (VLMs) reduce this output to a flat label or free-form text. We present HiPath, a lightweight VLM framework built on frozen UNI2 and Qwen3 backbones that treats structured report prediction as its primary training objective. Three trainable modules totalling 15M parameters address complementary aspects of the problem: a Hierarchical Patch Aggregator (HiPA) for multi-image visual encoding, Hierarchical Contrastive Learning (HiCL) for cross-modal alignment via optimal transport, and Slot-based Masked Diagnosis Prediction (Slot-MDP) for structured diagnosis generation. Trained on 749K real-world Chinese pathology cases from three hospitals, HiPath achieves 68.9% strict and 74.7% clinically acceptable accuracy with a 97.3% safety rate, outperforming all baselines under the same frozen backbone. Cross-hospital evaluation confirms generalisation with only a 3.4pp drop in strict accuracy while maintaining 97.1% safety.
Metadata
Related papers
Fractal universe and quantum gravity made simple
Fabio Briscese, Gianluca Calcagni • 2026-03-25
POLY-SIM: Polyglot Speaker Identification with Missing Modality Grand Challenge 2026 Evaluation Plan
Marta Moscati, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Marina Zanoni, Mubashir Noman, Rohan Kuma... • 2026-03-25
LensWalk: Agentic Video Understanding by Planning How You See in Videos
Keliang Li, Yansong Li, Hongze Shen, Mengdi Liu, Hong Chang, Shiguang Shan • 2026-03-25
Orientation Reconstruction of Proteins using Coulomb Explosions
Tomas André, Alfredo Bellisario, Nicusor Timneanu, Carl Caleman • 2026-03-25
The role of spatial context and multitask learning in the detection of organic and conventional farming systems based on Sentinel-2 time series
Jan Hemmerling, Marcel Schwieder, Philippe Rufin, Leon-Friedrich Thomas, Mire... • 2026-03-25
Raw Data (Debug)
{
"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19957v1</id>\n <title>HiPath: Hierarchical Vision-Language Alignment for Structured Pathology Report Prediction</title>\n <updated>2026-03-20T13:58:02Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19957v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.19957v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>Pathology reports are structured, multi-granular documents encoding diagnostic conclusions, histological grades, and ancillary test results across one or more anatomical sites; yet existing pathology vision-language models (VLMs) reduce this output to a flat label or free-form text. We present HiPath, a lightweight VLM framework built on frozen UNI2 and Qwen3 backbones that treats structured report prediction as its primary training objective. Three trainable modules totalling 15M parameters address complementary aspects of the problem: a Hierarchical Patch Aggregator (HiPA) for multi-image visual encoding, Hierarchical Contrastive Learning (HiCL) for cross-modal alignment via optimal transport, and Slot-based Masked Diagnosis Prediction (Slot-MDP) for structured diagnosis generation. Trained on 749K real-world Chinese pathology cases from three hospitals, HiPath achieves 68.9% strict and 74.7% clinically acceptable accuracy with a 97.3% safety rate, outperforming all baselines under the same frozen backbone. Cross-hospital evaluation confirms generalisation with only a 3.4pp drop in strict accuracy while maintaining 97.1% safety.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.CV'/>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.AI'/>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.LG'/>\n <published>2026-03-20T13:58:02Z</published>\n <arxiv:comment>10 pages, 1 figures, 3 tables</arxiv:comment>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.CV'/>\n <author>\n <name>Ruicheng Yuan</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Zhenxuan Zhang</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Anbang Wang</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Liwei Hu</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Xiangqian Hua</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Yaya Peng</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Jiawei Luo</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Guang Yang</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
}