FOCUS: Knowledge-enhanced Adaptive Visual Compression for Few-shot Whole Slide Image Classification

Few-shot learning presents a critical solution for cancer diagnosis in computational pathology (CPath), addressing fundamental limitations in data availability, particularly the scarcity of expert annotations and patient privacy constraints. A key challenge in this paradigm stems from the inherent disparity between the limited training set of whole slide images (WSIs) and the enormous number of contained patches, where a significant portion of these patches lacks diagnostically relevant information, potentially diluting the model’s ability to learn and focus on critical diagnostic features. While recent works attempt to address this by incorporating additional knowledge, several crucial gaps hinder further progress: (1) despite the emergence of powerful pathology foundation models (FMs), their potential remains largely untapped, with most approaches limiting their use to basic feature extraction; (2) current language guidance mechanisms attempt to align text prompts with vast numbers of WSI patches all at once, struggling to leverage rich pathological semantic information. To this end, we introduce the knowledge-enhanced adaptive visual compression framework, dubbed FOCUS, which uniquely combines pathology FMs with language prior knowledge to enable a focused analysis of diagnostically relevant regions by prioritizing discriminative WSI patches. Our approach implements a progressive three-stage compression strategy: we first leverage FMs for global visual redundancy elimination, and integrate compressed features with language prompts for semantic relevance assessment, then perform neighbor-aware visual token filtering while preserving spatial coherence. Extensive experiments on pathological datasets spanning breast, lung, and ovarian cancers demonstrate its superior performance in few-shot pathology diagnosis. Codes are available at https://github.com/dddavid4real/FOCUS.