arXiv Machine Learning

PerturbCellRL: Aligning Distributions and Grounding Biology via Post-Training Perturbation Generators

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

Generalizable single-cell perturbation response prediction using energy-guided flow matching

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 AI
Aug 18

PertMind: Eliciting Emergent Biological Reasoning in LLM via Reinforcement Learning on Cellular Perturbation Data

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

CellRFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Single-Cell Perturbation Modeling

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 Machine Learning
4d ago

Differentiable Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Predicting Cellular Responses to Gene Perturbation

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Predicting Cellular Responses to Gene Perturbation

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 AI
Sep 2

PopPert: Population-level Joint-Distribution Modeling for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction

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