PathPilot: An Adaptive Question-Conditioned Multi-Magnification Navigation Agent for Whole-Slide Image Analysis

Zhengyang Xu, Han Li, Jingsong Liu, Ayako Ura, Shihui Zu +3

The diagnostic capability of WSI agents relies on effective slide navigation to identify diagnostically relevant regions and efficiently integrate evidence across the slide. While in clinical practice, pathologists dynamically examine slides across multiple scales, integrating global and cellular evidence in a sequential manner, existing AI navigation approaches mostly operate at a single fixed magnification or rely on predefined magnification traversal. This mismatch prevents existing methods from modeling cross-magnification interactions and adaptive magnification selection inherent to real diagnostic workflows. We propose PathPilot, a clinically consistent multi-magnification WSI navigation agent that explicitly models cross-magnification localization and evidence-adaptive exploration. Specifically, we introduce a CrossMagLoc that learns magnification-specific diagnostic localization from pathologist viewing behavior and integrates information from adjacent magnifications to identify the diagnostically most relevant region within the current ROI, thereby providing a diagnostically informed starting point for subsequent question-conditioned exploration. We further introduce an…