AI RESEARCH
Beyond ViT Tokens: Masked-Diffusion Pretrained Convolutional Pathology Foundation Model for Cell-Level Dense Prediction
arXiv CS.CV
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ArXi:2605.08276v1 Announce Type: new Cell-level dense prediction is central to computational pathology, but remains challenging due to fine-grained histological structures, strong domain shifts, and costly dense annotations. Existing ViT-based pathology foundation models rely on patch tokenization, which can disrupt spatial continuity and weaken local morphological details needed for cell-level prediction. To address this, we propose Masked-Diffusion Convolutional Foundation Models, termed ConvNeXt Masked-Diffusion (CMD), a self-supervised convolutional generative pre.