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Despite that deep learning methods have achieved remarkable performance in pathology image classification, they heavily rely on labeled data, demanding extensive human annotation efforts. In this study, we present a novel human annotation-free method for pathology image classification by leveraging pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Without human annotation, pseudo labels of the training set are obtained by utilizing the zero-shot inference capabilities of VLM, which may contain a lot of noise due to the domain shift between the pre-training data and the target dataset. To address this issue, we introduce VLM-CPL, a novel approach based on consensus pseudo labels that integrates two noisy label filtering techniques with a semi-supervised learning strategy. Specifically, we first obtain prompt-based pseudo labels with uncertainty estimation by zero-shot inference with the VLM using multiple augmented views of an input. Then, by leveraging the feature representation ability of VLM, we obtain feature-based pseudo labels via sample clustering in the feature space. Prompt-feature consensus is introduced to select reliable samples based on the consensus between the two types of pseudo labels. By rejecting low-quality pseudo labels, we further propose High-confidence Cross Supervision (HCS) to learn from samples with reliable pseudo labels and the remaining unlabeled samples. Experimental results showed that our method obtained an accuracy of 87.1% and 95.1% on the HPH and LC25K datasets, respectively, and it largely outperformed existing zero-shot classification and noisy label learning methods. The code is available at https://github.com/lanfz2000/VLM-CPL.
Zhong et al. (Sat,) studied this question.