Causal inference using front door intervention and multi-instance learning (MIL) has advanced the analysis of Whole Slide Images (WSI) in digital pathology. These methods adjust feature distributions of subtle evidence sub-images to correctly associate them with WSI-level diagnoses. We propose and prove 2 hypotheses for evaluating such methods: 1) Causal inference MIL introduces an independent classification channel that effectively completes WSI classification; 2) Greater difference between features extracted by the new and baseline channels increases effectiveness in eliminating false correlations. This hypothesis describes the core of causal inference MILs: overlaying parallel, independent channels to eliminate false associations between WSI-level diagnostic and non-diagnostic evidence sub-images by increasing deep feature diversity. Based on these hypotheses, we evaluated several causal inference MILs on breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer datasets. This hypothesis provides a new theoretical perspective for applying causal inference to WSI analysis.
Fidelity and perceptual quality are two inherently competing and conflicting objectives in the image super-resolution (SR) task. Different loss functions focus on these objectives to varying extents. Regression losses enhance the model's fidelity but lack sufficient attention to high-frequency details, resulting in a loss of fine details. In contrast, perception losses improve the model's visual quality but may introduce undesirable artifacts. Balancing these two optimization goals can be viewed as a Multi-Objective Optimization problem. Existing methods are limited to cautiously adjusting weight parameters between these losses, overlooking the underlying Interest Entanglement problem. To address this problem, we explore the inherent frequency-domain conflict between the regression objective and the perceptual objective, and analyze the causes of Interest Entanglement in SR tasks. According to our findings, we propose the Shared-Feature-Representation based Super-Resolution framework (SFR), which decouples the learning process of different optimization objectives, allowing the model to explore a common optimization direction for both goals and achieve an effective balance between them. To better leverage shared features, we also proposed the InfoSqueeze module, which filters redundant information through a dimensionality reduction and expansion process, effectively transforming features into a consistent space. Quantitative and qualitative experiments across five representative datasets affirm the superiority of SFR.