Blog

August 28, 2025

Publication

Low-Rank Adaptations for increased Generalization in Foundation Model features

September 27, 2025

Vilde Schulerud Bøe, Andreas Kleppe, Sebastian Foersch, Daniel-Christoph Wagner, Lill-Tove Rasmussen Busund, Adín Ramírez Rivera

Paper abstract

For foundation models (FMs) to truly advance computational pathology, they must deliver consistent and reliable predictions under diverse, unseen test conditions. Without such robustness, clinical trust and widespread adoption remain out of reach. Although many FMs for histopathology now exist, they have to our knowledge not been systematically tested for robustness by external researchers on independent datasets. In this study, we evaluate the robustness of foundation model features on three separate histopathology datasets and find that their performance drops on external data. Our analysis also reveals that these models often encode dataset-specific information, limiting their generalizability. To address this issue, we train a Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) with strong data augmentations to improve feature robustness. Our experiments show that models trained with this adapter exhibit fewer signs of dataset-specific information and may generate more robust features across domains. These results highlight the need for robustness testing and encourage incorporating robustness considerations into the development, training, and tuning of FMs for histopathology. The code for this work will be available at https://github.com/dsb-ifi/DoRA-for-FM-robustness