What Makes High-Magnification Knowledge Transferable? A Study of Cross-Resolution Distillation in Whole-Slide Imaging

Abstract

Cross-resolution knowledge distillation aims to improve low-magnification whole- slide analysis by transferring high-magnification representations, yet the conditions for useful transfer remain unclear. We develop a decomposition-based analysis of teacher access, representation loss, and model excess, motivating three questions: whether (a) teacher targets help the task, (b) low-magnification students can predict them, and (c) slide models benefit from those predictions. We investigate them through controlled experiments across ten pathology cohorts spanning classifi- cation, grading, and survival prediction. In the main comparison, providing teacher regional means alongside native low-magnification features improves downstream performance in all ten cohorts. Direct prediction achieves lower reconstruction error than residual prediction, yet the predicted features underrepresent variation in the teacher targets. Moreover, better reconstruction does not consistently improve downstream scores, and retaining native features changes performance even when the predicted teacher features are held fixed. Together, these findings expose a gap between reconstructing teacher representations and realizing their downstream value. They challenge the sufficiency of reconstruction error as a measure of cross-resolution transfer and provide a diagnostic framework for examining where that transfer breaks down. Future distillation designs must account for both what students can predict and how slide models use those predictions.