Adaptive Prototype Learning for Multimodal Cancer Survival Analysis

Abstract: Leveraging multimodal data, particularly the integration of whole-slide histology images (WSIs) and transcriptomic profiles, holds great promise for improving cancer survival prediction. However, excessive redundancy in multimodal data can degrade model performance. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Prototype Learning (APL), a novel and effective approach for multimodal cancer survival analysis. APL adaptively learns representative prototypes in a data-driven manner, reducing redundancy while preserving critical information. Our method employs two sets of learnable query vectors that serve as a bridge between high-dimensional representations and survival prediction, capturing task-relevant features. Additionally, we introduce a multimodal mixed self-attention mechanism to enable cross-modal interactions, further enhancing information fusion. Extensive experiments on five benchmark cancer datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/HongLiuuuuu/APL.