Token-Level Cross-Modal Transformer with Contrastive Multi-Task Learning for Breast Cancer Subtype Classification and Survival Prediction

Abstract

Integrating heterogeneous genomic and clinical modalities for joint cancer subtype classification and survival prediction remains a key challenge in precision oncology. Existing approaches suffer from three limitations: (1) they treat each modality as a monolithic feature vector, precluding fine-grained token-level interactions across modalities; (2) cross-modal fusion is typically performed through linear weighting or late averaging rather than structured token exchange; and (3) survival and classification objectives are optimized independently, missing a joint regularization signal.