Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a weakly supervised learning paradigm that is becoming increasingly popular because it requires less labeling effort than fully supervised methods. This is especially interesting for areas where the creation of large annotated datasets remains challenging, as in medicine. Although recent deep learning MIL approaches have obtained state-of-the-art results, they are fully deterministic and do not provide uncertainty estimations for the predictions. In this work, we introduce the Attention Gaussian Process (AGP) model, a novel probabilistic attention mechanism based on Gaussian Processes for deep MIL. AGP provides accurate bag-level predictions as well as instance-level explainability, and can be trained end-to-end. Moreover, its probabilistic nature guarantees robustness to overfitting on small datasets and uncertainty estimations for the predictions. The latter is especially important in medical applications, where decisions have a direct impact on the patient's health. The proposed model is validated experimentally as follows. First, its behavior is illustrated in two synthetic MIL experiments based on the well-known MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively. Then, it is evaluated in three different real-world cancer detection experiments. AGP outperforms state-of-the-art MIL approaches, including deterministic deep learning ones. It shows a strong performance even on a small dataset with less than 100 labels and generalizes better than competing methods on an external test set. Moreover, we experimentally show that predictive uncertainty correlates with the risk of wrong predictions, and therefore it is a good indicator of reliability in practice. Our code is publicly available.

本文介绍了一种基于高斯过程的新型概率注意力机制——关注高斯过程(AGP)模型，用于多实例学习(MIL)，在医学应用中表现出色，可精确预测袋水平和实例级别的预测，具有表现力解释，并且具有所提出方法本质的概率性质，可以提供稳健性和确定性估计。实验结果表明AGP能够胜过其他现有的MIL方法，特别是能够在较小的数据集上更好地泛化。

基于高斯过程的概率注意力用于深度多示例学习