CARE: A Molecular-Guided Foundation Model with Adaptive Region Modeling for Whole Slide Image Analysis

Existing pathology foundation models often inherit natural-image backbones that overlook the heterogeneous and irregular organization of pathological regions of interest. CARE introduces a two-stage pretraining strategy that first learns morphological structure from large-scale whole-slide images and then aligns adaptive region representations with molecular signals from RNA and protein profiles. Using only a fraction of the pretraining data common in prior work, CARE delivers strong average performance across 33 downstream benchmarks for classification, molecular prediction, and survival analysis.
Recommended citation: D Zhang, Z Gong, X Pang, J Liu, J Lu, H Cui, J Ge, Z Zeng, K Yi, Y Li, S Liu, T Yu, H Wang, M Crispin-Ortuzar, W Yu, C Li, Z Gao*. CARE: A Molecular-Guided Foundation Model with Adaptive Region Modeling for Whole Slide Image Analysis. Accepted to IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026.
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