arxivcs.CV2026-07-06
Multi-Teacher Contrastive Distillation for Edge-Efficient Pathology Foundation Models
Tim Lenz, Maurice Heide, Marco Gustav, Nic G. Reitsam, Jakob Nikolas Kather
Computational pathology foundation models (PFMs) have advanced whole-slide image analysis. However, their size and inference cost hinder local deployment in pathology departments. We propose MuCoDi, a pretraining framework that distills frozen tile embeddings from multiple PFMs i…