arXiv:2606. 27752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-cell perturbation models can reduce costly wet-lab screening by predicting how cells respond transcriptionally to interventions.
By Dongxia Wu, Mingyu Li, Yuhui Zhang, Anurendra Kumar, Emma Lundberg, Serena Yeung-Levy, Emily B. Fox
The paper introduces scEGFlow, an energy‑guided flow matching framework that predicts how single cells respond to perturbations by modeling continuous transitions from control to perturbed states. It uses conditional flow matching and condition‑specific energy gradients to dynamically adjust predictions without retraining, achieving superior performance on imaging and transcriptomic benchmarks, even for unseen perturbations or limited data. The method preserves cellular manifold geometry, heterogeneity, and accurately recapitulates gene‑expression regulatory patterns.
By Jianan Wei, Jiajun Hong, Guikun Chen, Ning Yang, Lifeng Fan, Wenguan Wang
arXiv:2608. 16419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can describe mechanisms, yet scalable post-training still depends on costly, manually curated biological reasoning traces.
By Zhenchao Tang, Xiaogang Xu, Tianxu Lv, Jiahui Guan, Jiale Zhou, Haohuai He, Zhi Song, Hanbo Huang, Jiehui Huang, Jiafei Wu, Zhe Liu
CellRFT is a reinforcement fine‑tuning framework designed to improve single‑cell perturbation modeling by directly optimizing biological evaluation metrics. It employs policy‑gradient methods to learn from non‑differentiable biological rewards and aggregates multiple rewards hierarchically. Experiments show that CellRFT enhances perturbation prediction across various pretrained models and reveals interactions between different biological criteria, suggesting new ways to shape model behavior and evaluation design.
By Jie Yan, Li Liu, Hanze Guo, Jiaxin Hu, Houxin He, Xiaoning Qi, Haoran Wang, Cong Li, Zhong-Yuan Zhang, Yong Wang
arXiv:2606. 13713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting cellular transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in single-cell biology, especially in the zero-shot setting where the perturbed gene or gene combination is unseen during training.
By Wei Zhang, Xun Jiang, Yuesi Xi, Ming Tang
The paper introduces PT‑RAG, a retrieval‑augmented generation framework that enhances cellular perturbation response prediction by incorporating context from related perturbations. PT‑RAG uses a two‑stage retrieval process—semantic retrieval to shortlist candidate perturbations followed by a differentiable Gumbel‑Softmax selector that adapts the selection based on cell state and query perturbation. Experiments on two backbones, a frozen STATE‑style generator and a fully trained scGPT, show that PT‑RAG improves distributional similarity and predictive quality, achieving a 5.9% reduction in 2‑Wasserstein distance on cross‑cell‑type tasks.
By Andrea Giuseppe Di Francesco, Andrea Rubbi, Rishabh Jain, Pietro Li\`o
The paper introduces PT‑RAG, a retrieval‑augmented generation framework that enhances deep learning models for predicting cellular transcriptional responses to gene perturbations. PT‑RAG adds a two‑stage retrieval module—semantic retrieval followed by a Gumbel‑Softmax selector—to supply contextually relevant perturbation information, improving predictive accuracy across cell types and perturbations. Experiments on STATE‑style and scGPT backbones show consistent gains, such as a 5.9% reduction in 2‑Wasserstein distance for cross‑cell‑type predictions.
By Andrea Giuseppe Di Francesco, Andrea Rubbi, Rishabh Jain, Pietro Li\`o
arXiv:2610.13966v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Predicting cellular responses to chemical and genetic perturbations is a central test for AI virtual cells, yet many single-cell models reduce each c...
By Haojie Yang, Ran Su
arXiv:2608. 15288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting single-cell transcriptomic responses to genetic perturbations is central to functional genomics and virtual-cell modeling.
By Ninghan Fan, Qi Liu, Xunuo Zhu, Yukai Sun, Luyuan Chen, Xuheng Zhou, Yuetian Du, Ming Kong, Xiaojun Zhu, Jie Liu, Zhan Zhou, Qiang Zhu
PopPert is a framework that models population-level joint gene expression distributions to predict transcriptional responses to perturbations in single-cell RNA sequencing data. By using a low‑rank Gaussian Copula, it captures gene co‑expression patterns and eliminates the need for cell‑to‑cell correspondence, thereby reducing sensitivity to single‑cell noise. Across multiple benchmarks, PopPert outperforms existing methods in differential expression recovery, perturbation effect estimation, and distribution matching, demonstrating the effectiveness of population‑level joint distribution learning for unpaired single‑cell data.
By Handong Wang, Jiaxin Qi, Haochen Feng, Baisheng Lai
arXiv:2606. 11286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-content imaging assays quantify cellular responses to chemical and genetic perturbations, yet continuous trajectories of individual cells are unobservable because cells are chemically fixed at acquisition.
By Xurui Wang, Qin Ren, Jun Ma, Haibin Ling, Chenyu You
arXiv:2608.23114v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Predicting transcriptome-wide responses to unseen genetic perturbations remains a major computational challenge because accurate prediction requires...
By Jiawen Liu, Xuechenxiao Cao, Yutong Li, Bing Liu, Jiaming Liang, Tinghe Zhang, Xiaoqi Sheng, Hongmin Cai