Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
arXiv:2603.09943 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]
Title:PathMem: Toward Cognition-Aligned Memory Transformation for Pathology MLLMs
Authors:Jinyue Li, Yuci Liang, Qiankun Li, Xinheng Lyu, Jiayu Qian, Huabao Chen, Kun Wang, Zhigang Zeng, Anil Anthony Bharath, Yang Liu
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Abstract:Computational pathology demands both visual pattern recognition and dynamic integration of structured domain knowledge, including taxonomy, grading criteria, and clinical evidence. In practice, diagnostic reasoning requires linking morphological evidence with formal diagnostic and grading criteria. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong vision language reasoning capabilities, they lack explicit mechanisms for structured knowledge integration and interpretable memory control. As a result, existing models struggle to consistently incorporate pathology-specific diagnostic standards during reasoning. Inspired by the hierarchical memory process of human pathologists, we propose PathMem, a memory-centric multimodal framework for pathology MLLMs. PathMem organizes structured pathology knowledge as a long-term memory (LTM) and introduces a Memory Transformer that models the dynamic transition from LTM to working memory (WM) through multimodal memory activation and context-aware knowledge grounding, enabling context-aware memory refinement for downstream reasoning. PathMem achieves SOTA performance across benchmarks, improving WSI-Bench report generation (12.8% WSI-Precision, 10.1% WSI-Relevance) and open-ended diagnosis by 9.7% and 8.9% over prior WSI-based models.
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2603.09943 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2603.09943v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09943
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View a PDF of the paper titled PathMem: Toward Cognition-Aligned Memory Transformation for Pathology MLLMs, by Jinyue Li and 9 other authors
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