CAFlow: Adaptive-Depth Single-Step Flow Matching for Efficient Histopathology Super-Resolution

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18513v1
• Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 05:45:58 GMT
• Title: CAFlow: Adaptive-Depth Single-Step Flow Matching for Efficient Histopathology Super-Resolution
• Abstract summary: Whole-slide images routinely exceed gigapixel resolution, making computationally intensive generative super-resolution impractical for routine deployment.<n>We introduce CAFlow, an adaptive-depth single-step flow-matching framework that routes each image tile to the shallowest network exit.<n>On multi-organ histocubic x4 SR, adaptive routing achieves 31.72 dB PSNR versus 31.84 dB at full depth, while the shallowest exit exceeds bipathology by +1.9 dB at 2.8x less compute than SwinIR-light.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: In digital pathology, whole-slide images routinely exceed gigapixel resolution, making computationally intensive generative super-resolution (SR) impractical for routine deployment. We introduce CAFlow, an adaptive-depth single-step flow-matching framework that routes each image tile to the shallowest network exit that preserves reconstruction quality. CAFlow performs flow matching in pixel-unshuffled rearranged space, reducing spatial computation by 16x while enabling direct inference. We show that dedicating half of training to exact t=0 samples is essential for single-step quality (-1.5 dB without it). The backbone, FlowResNet (1.90M parameters), mixes convolution and window self-attention blocks across four early exits spanning 3.1 to 13.3 GFLOPs. A lightweight exit classifier (~6K parameters) achieves 33% compute savings at only 0.12 dB cost. On multi-organ histopathology x4 SR, adaptive routing achieves 31.72 dB PSNR versus 31.84 dB at full depth, while the shallowest exit exceeds bicubic by +1.9 dB at 2.8x less compute than SwinIR-light. The method generalizes to held-out colon tissue with minimal quality loss (-0.02 dB), and at x8 upscaling it outperforms all comparable-compute baselines while remaining competitive with the much larger SwinIR-Medium model. Downstream nuclei segmentation confirms preservation of clinically relevant structure. The model trains in under 5 hours on a single GPU, and adaptive routing can reduce whole-slide inference from minutes to seconds.

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