MIL-PF: Multiple Instance Learning on Precomputed Features for Mammography Classification
Authors: Nikola Jovišić, Milica Škipina, Nicola Dall'Asen, Dubravko Ćulibrk
Organizations: Institute for AI R&D of Serbia, Serbia · Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia · University of Trento, Italy · University of Pisa, Italy · Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Modern foundation models provide highly expressive visual representations, yet adapting them to high-resolution medical imaging remains challenging due to limited annotations and weak supervision. Mammography, in particular, is characterized by large images, variable multi-view studies and predominantly breast-level labels, making end-to-end fine-tuning computationally expensive and often impractical. We propose Multiple Instance Learning on Precomputed Features (MIL-PF), a scalable framework that combines frozen foundation encoders with a lightweight MIL head for mammography classification. By precomputing the semantic representations and training only a small task-specific aggregation module (40k parameters), the method enables efficient experimentation and adaptation without retraining large backbones. The architecture explicitly models the global tissue context and the sparse local lesion signals through attention-based aggregation. MIL-PF achieves state-of-the-art classification performance at clinical scale while substantially reducing training complexity. We release the code for full reproducibility.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: The MIL-PF pipeline diagram, divided into distinct stages: Feature Precomputing producing Embeddings dataset E and Head Training using them.
VinDr
EMBED
Model/Paper
# Trainable Params (M)
Level
AUC ↑
bAcc ↑
Spec@ Sens=0.9 ↑
AUC ↑
bAcc ↑
Spec@ Sens=0.9 ↑
ES-Att side [ 12 ]
22.89
Case
0.786
0.749
0.193
0.836
0.668
0.558
SIL IL GMIC-ResNet18 [ 12 ]
22.49
Image
0.911
0.855
0.698
0.875
0.802
0.566
GMIC [ 18 ]
14.11
Image
0.899
0.826
0.690
0.816
0.736
0.380
FPN-AbMIL [ 8 ]
1.76
Image
0.920
0.844
0.720
0.802
0.740
0.367
FPN-SetTrans [ 8 ]
5.38
Image
0.908
0.827
0.670
0.794
0.728
0.364
Table 1: Quantitative comparison of MIL-PF against SOTA baselines on VinDr and EMBED on BI-RADS-based malignancy. MIL-PF demonstrates superior performance, particularly on the large-scale, noisy EMBED dataset, highlighting its robustness.
VinDr - Mass
VinDr - Calcification
RSNA - Cancer
Model/Paper
# Trainable Params (M)
Level
AUC ↑
bAcc ↑
Spec@ Sens=0.9 ↑
AUC ↑
bAcc ↑
Spec@ Sens=0.9 ↑
AUC ↑
bAcc ↑
Spec@ Sens=0.9 ↑
ES-Att side [ 12 ]
22.89
Case
0.738
0.669
0.266
0.937
0.864
0.877
0.890
0.799
0.642
SIL IL GMIC-ResNet18 [ 12 ]
22.49
Image
0.772
0.703
0.307
0.953
0.886
0.886
0.899
0.754
0.684
GMIC [ 18 ]
14.11
Image
0.755
0.687
0.286
0.941
0.855
0.899
0.773
0.699
0.434
FPN-AbMIL [ 8 ]
1.76
Image
0.792
0.720
0.382
0.954
0.902
0.904
0.891
0.793
0.628
FPN-SetTrans [ 8 ]
5.38
Image
0.785
0.734
0.367
0.942
0.884
0.836
0.874
0.773
0.656
Table 2: Quantitative comparison of MIL-PF against SOTA baselines on the VinDr and RSNA datasets. MIL-PF demonstrates superior performance.
Figure 2: Attention maps for masses and calcifications obtained by overlapping the MIL-PF’s local stream window. Ground truth is shown in green and predictions in red.
Calcification
Mass
Model/Paper
mAP ↑
mAP s ↑
mAP m ↑
mAP l ↑
mAP ↑
mAP s ↑
mAP m ↑
mAP l ↑
FPN-AbMIL [ 8 ]
32.0
9.1
34.8
57.5
28.2
4.7
32.1
66.2
FPN-SetTrans [ 8 ]
37.4
18.8
39.5
62.2
24.3
3.0
28.0
73.2
MIL-PF (Ours, DINOv2)
24.4
0.4
22.5
94.44
16.3
0.1
15.9
62.8
MIL-PF (Ours, MedSigLIP)
38.4
1.2
52.5
84.9
14.1
0.1
11.3
58.4
Table 3: Comparison of proposed MIL-PF with FPN [ 8 ] . Detection performance is reported for all (mAP), small (mAP s ), medium (mAP m ) and large (mAP l ) lesions.
Model
Resolution
AUC ↑
Spec@Sens=0.9 ↑
MammoCLIP [ 4 ]
1520×912
0.870
0.558
BiomedCLIP [ 22 ]
224×224
0.872
0.606
MedSigLIP [ 17 ]
448×448
0.897
0.691
RADDINO [ 13 ]
518×518
0.854
0.499
DINOv2 [ 11 ] ViT Giant
518×518
0.897
0.655
DINOv3 [ 19 ] ViT Huge+
512×512
0.831
0.497
Table 4: Encoder selection (left) and ablation on aggregation types (right) on EMBED.
College of Engineering and Computer Science, VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam · Imperial College London, London, UK · Radiology Department, Vietnam National Cancer Hospital, Hanoi, Vietnam +2
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India · Yardi School of AI, IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India · Department of Radiodiagnosis, PGIMER Chandigarh, Chandigarh, India