BioX-CPath: Biologically-driven Explainable Diagnostics for Multistain IHC Computational Pathology

The development of biologically interpretable and explainable models remains a key challenge in computational pathology, particularly for multistain immunohistochemistry (IHC) analysis. We present BioX-CPath, an explainable graph neural network architecture for whole slide image (WSI) classification that leverages both spatial and semantic features across multiple stains. At its core, BioX-CPath introduces a novel Stain-Aware Attention Pooling (SAAP) module that generates biologically meaningful, stain-aware patient embeddings. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Rheumatoid Arthritis and Sjogren's Disease multistain datasets. Beyond performance metrics, BioX-CPath provides interpretable insights through stain attention scores, entropy measures, and stain interaction scores, that permit measuring model alignment with known pathological mechanisms. This biological grounding, combined with strong classification performance, makes BioX-CPath particularly suitable for clinical applications where interpretability is key. Source code and documentation can be found at: https://github.com/AmayaGS/BioX-CPath.

SuperCap: Multi-resolution Superpixel-based Image Captioning

It has been a longstanding goal within image captioning to move beyond a dependence on object detection. We investigate using superpixels coupled with Vision Language Models (VLMs) to bridge the gap between detector-based captioning architectures and those that solely pretrain on large datasets. Our novel superpixel approach ensures that the model receives object-like features whilst the use of VLMs provides our model with open set object understanding. Furthermore, we extend our architecture to make use of multi-resolution inputs, allowing our model to view images in different levels of detail, and use an attention mechanism to determine which parts are most relevant to the caption. We demonstrate our model's performance with multiple VLMs and through a range of ablations detailing the impact of different architectural choices. Our full model achieves a competitive CIDEr score of $136.9$ on the COCO Karpathy split.

Graph Neural Networks in Vision-Language Image Understanding: A Survey

2D image understanding is a complex problem within Computer Vision, but it holds the key to providing human level scene comprehension. It goes further than identifying the objects in an image, and instead it attempts to understand the scene. Solutions to this problem form the underpinning of a range of tasks, including image captioning, Visual Question Answering (VQA), and image retrieval. Graphs provide a natural way to represent the relational arrangement between objects in an image, and thus in recent years Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a standard component of many 2D image understanding pipelines, becoming a core architectural component especially in the VQA group of tasks. In this survey, we review this rapidly evolving field and we provide a taxonomy of graph types used in 2D image understanding approaches, a comprehensive list of the GNN models used in this domain, and a roadmap of future potential developments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey that covers image captioning, visual question answering, and image retrieval techniques that focus on using GNNs as the main part of their architecture.