Stain-Aware Wavelet Regularization for Instant Adversarial Purification in Histopathology
Zhe Li, Bernhard Kainz
Abstract
Deep learning has become prevalent in computational pathology pipelines that support tasks such as cancer screening and digital pathology analysis. However, the susceptibility of neural networks to adversarial perturbations raises safety concerns for reliable deployment in clinical practice. In histopathological images, this challenge is exacerbated by the difficulty of distinguishing high-frequency adversarial noise from subtle and diagnostically relevant tissue structures. To address this issue, we propose Stain-Aware Wavelet Regularization (SAWR), an adversarial purification framework that leverages multi-level wavelet-domain regularization based on Haar transform to hierarchically disentangle adversarial perturbations from diagnostic structural information. This spectral constraint is further extended to individual histological channels, enabling stain-specific frequency regulation consistent with the biological properties of Hematoxylin and Eosin. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAWR improves adversarial robustness by up to 10.69\% over the baseline approach, while maintaining texture and spectral fidelity under adversarial perturbations.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.