arXiv Machine Learning

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.

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 AI
Sep 2

SCALE:Scalable Conditional Atlas-Level Endpoint transport for virtual cell perturbation prediction

SCALE is a conditional transport model that treats cells as unordered sets to predict treated cell populations without requiring cell-level matching. It uses a shared set-aware encoder and a conditional DiT backbone to learn latent transport, enabling endpoint supervision that is directly delta-aligned. Across diverse perturbation types—including genetic, chemical, developmental, and immune—SCALE accurately recovers gene‑expression changes, response directions, and population structure, outperforming competing methods on CRISPR data and successfully prioritizing cytokines that elicit distinct immune responses.

By Shuizhou Chen, Lang Yu, Xueqin Lin, Xinjie Mao, Songming Zhang, Xinyu Gu, Hao Wu, Sheng Xu, Kedu Jin, Lei Bai, Quan Qian, Qin Chen, Qiang Gao, Siqi Sun, Zhangyang Gao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 24

PerturbRx: Learning Treatment-Conditioned Latent Transitions for Patient Drug Response Prediction

PerturbRx is a treatment‑conditioned representation learning framework that learns latent transitions induced by drug interventions. It trains a drug‑ and dose‑conditioned transition predictor using control and treated single‑cell populations, then applies this predictor to pretreatment patient profiles to generate response features without needing post‑treatment data. On TCGA and patient‑derived xenograft benchmarks, PerturbRx outperforms other methods, demonstrating the value of perturbation‑pretrained latent transitions for patient‑level drug‑response prediction.

By Yoshitaka Inoue, Minoh Jeong, Alfred Hero, Rui Kuang, Augustin Luna