SLICEChat: Progressive In-Encoder Token Pruning for Whole-Slide Pathology Language Models

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.24894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whole-slide pathology images (WSIs) contain gigapixel-scale visual content, creating a major scalability challenge for slide-level multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing approaches process thousands of patch tokens and typically apply compression only after slide encoding, leaving multimodal attention computationally expensive. We introduce SLICEChat, a slide-level MLLM that integrates progressive token pruning within a hybrid Mamba--