Open-source framework for detecting bias and overfitting for large pathology images

Even foundational models that are trained on datasets with billions of data samples may develop shortcuts that lead to overfitting and bias. Shortcuts are non-relevant patterns in data, such as the background color or color intensity. So, to ensure the robustness of deep learning applications, there is a need for methods to detect and remove such shortcuts. Today's model debugging methods are time consuming since they often require customization to fit for a given model architecture in a specific domain. We propose a generalized, model-agnostic framework to debug deep learning models. We focus on the domain of histopathology, which has very large images that require large models - and therefore large computation resources. It can be run on a workstation with a commodity GPU. We demonstrate that our framework can replicate non-image shortcuts that have been found in previous work for self-supervised learning models, and we also identify possible shortcuts in a foundation model. Our easy to use tests contribute to the development of more reliable, accurate, and generalizable models for WSI analysis. Our framework is available as an open-source tool available on github.

@article{sildnes2025_2503.01827,
  title={ Open-source framework for detecting bias and overfitting for large pathology images },
  author={ Anders Sildnes and Nikita Shvetsov and Masoud Tafavvoghi and Vi Ngoc-Nha Tran and Kajsa Møllersen and Lill-Tove Rasmussen Busund and Thomas K. Kilvær and Lars Ailo Bongo },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01827},
  year={ 2025 }
}