AI RESEARCH
Multi-Stage Fine-Tuning of Pathology Foundation Models with Head-Diverse Ensembling for White Blood Cell Classification
arXiv CS.CV
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ArXi:2603.20383v1 Announce Type: new The classification of white blood cells (WBCs) from peripheral blood smears is critical for the diagnosis of leukemia. However, automated approaches still struggle due to challenges including class imbalance, domain shift, and morphological continuum confusion, where adjacent maturation stages exhibit subtle, overlapping features. We present a multi-stage fine-tuning methodology for 13-class WBC classification in the WBCBench 2026 Challenge (ISBI 2026