arXiv:2608. 06824v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central task in virtual cell modeling is predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to unseen genetic perturbations and drug combinations, and biological networks provide valuable priors on gene relationships.
By Quanquan Li, Yihe Chi, Liuyang Song, Hongbo Zhang, Jingyu Li, Xidong Xi, Conghua Wei, Yijie Sun, Yu Chen, Xin Liu, Qi Hu, Jing Ke, Guitao Cao
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
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
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
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. 12838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks.
By Danning Jiang, Zheming An, Yalong Zhao, Lipeng Lai
arXiv:2602. 04901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in functional genomics.
By Jiafa Ruan, Ruijie Quan, Liyang Xu, Zongxin Yang, Yi Yang
arXiv:2606. 30695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-cell drug perturbation models should predict not only transcriptional response magnitude, but also whether a treatment alters the proliferative state of a cell.
By Dingping Zhao, Jie Lin
arXiv:2607. 19426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-cell datasets are increasingly costly to store, audit, and reuse for model training.
By Yaodi Luo, Peize He, Bowen Han, Lingbei Mengg
VGAS: Variance-Reduced Guidance and Adaptive Selection for Training-Free Reward Alignment in Discrete Diffusion proposes a new inference-time framework that improves steering of frozen masked discrete diffusion models. By reducing the variance of guidance estimates, applying reward tilting to clean-token logits, and adapting the selection temperature at each step, VGAS addresses three default choices in existing pipelines. Experiments on regulatory DNA, protein, and small-molecule benchmarks show that VGAS achieves the best training-free reward performance and matches or surpasses reward-fine-tuned generators.
By Kwanyoung Kim
arXiv:2606. 06303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controllable generation with discrete diffusion models is often hindered by high computational overhead or the need for retraining.
By Hongkun Dou, Zike Chen, Fengji Li, Hongjue Li, Yue Deng
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