HERO: Hypothesis-Driven Evidence Retrieval from Omics for Multi-Task Breast Cancer Analysis
Xiangyu Li, Ran Su
Abstract
Matched multi-omics can improve WSI-based biomarker and prognosis prediction, but most existing pipelines use omics as a paral lel feature stream or textual context rather than as an explicit retrieval constraint. HERO asks whether observed omics can be a testable mor phology hypothesis: a sparse pathway-to-morphology prior maps DNA methylation and miRNA into a K-dimensional intent vector m (K=16), TF-IDF retrieval over structured 10 captions selects endpoint-relevant regions, and a cosine gate c=cos(m,v) triggers deterministic deficit driven repair when c<τc. This closed-loop design bounds VLM calls, reduces reliance on embedding-based semantic matching, and makes every retrieval and verification step lexically auditable. On TCGA-BRCA (930WSIs, patient-level 5-fold CV), HERO sets new state-of-the-art across ER, PR, HER2, subtype, and risk prediction, outperforming both multimodal fusion and VLM-based baselines.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.