Paper Detail

MergeSurv: Merging-Based Continual Learning for Survival Analysis on Whole-Slide Images

Vu Minh Tran, Doanh C. Bui, Maï K. Nguyen, Khang Nguyen

arxiv Score 13.5

Published 2026-07-06 · First seen 2026-07-10

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Survival analysis on Whole Slide Images (WSIs) is important in computational pathology for prognosis estimation and treatment planning. However, existing survival models are typically trained independently for each cancer cohort, making continual adaptation computationally expensive for gigapixel-scale WSIs. In this study, we propose MergeSurv, a merging-based continual learning framework for WSI survival analysis. A pathology vision-language foundation model is independently fine-tuned on each task, and the learned parameters are sequentially merged into a unified model without storing previous training data. We further investigate two inference strategies: One-for-All (OFA) and Voting-Expert Aggregation (VEA). Experiments on four TCGA cohorts demonstrate that MergeSurv outperforms naive fine-tuning as well as representative regularization-based and rehearsal-based continual learning methods, while effectively reducing catastrophic forgetting. The results suggest that model merging is a promising direction for scalable and privacy-preserving continual learning in computational pathology.

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BibTeX

@article{tran2026mergesurv,
  title = {MergeSurv: Merging-Based Continual Learning for Survival Analysis on Whole-Slide Images},
  author = {Vu Minh Tran and Doanh C. Bui and Maï K. Nguyen and Khang Nguyen},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Survival analysis on Whole Slide Images (WSIs) is important in computational pathology for prognosis estimation and treatment planning. However, existing survival models are typically trained independently for each cancer cohort, making continual adaptation computationally expensive for gigapixel-scale WSIs. In this study, we propose MergeSurv, a merging-based continual learning framework for WSI survival analysis. A pathology vision-language foundation model is independently fine-tuned on each },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04747},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2607.04747},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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