arXiv AI

Spatially Informed and Direction Sensitive Representation Learning for Spatial Transcriptomics

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

SpaFactor: Lightweight Spatial Context-Aware Gene Program Modeling for Histology-to-Transcriptomics Inference

SpaFactor is a lightweight framework that predicts spatial gene expression from hematoxylin and eosin images by fusing central spot visuals with multiscale neighborhood context. It uses a residual MLP to map tissue microenvironment to low‑dimensional latent gene programs, which are decoded into coordinated multi‑gene predictions. Across five public cohorts, SpaFactor outperforms existing methods, especially for spatially variable genes, and better recovers biologically organized spatial patterns.

By Shiting Ruan, Xitong Ling, Qiming He, Ziyou Yan, Huaitian Yuan, Tian Guan, Ying Xiao, Xu Guan, Yonghong He
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

Biology-Guided Context-Aware Residual Propagation for Spatial Gene Expression Prediction from Histology

The paper introduces BCARP, a Biology‑Guided Context‑Aware Residual Propagation framework that predicts spatial gene expression from H&E‑stained histology images. Rather than directly decoding expression from visual features, BCARP treats histology embeddings as morphological priors and iteratively refines spot representations in a transcriptomics‑oriented latent space, integrating nuclei‑guided local context and prototype‑guided global propagation. Evaluations on three spatial transcriptomics datasets and ten HEST‑1k cohorts show that BCARP outperforms existing baselines in mean correlation‑based metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of biology‑guided local‑global residual propagation for histology‑to‑transcriptomics prediction.

By Vu Van An, Long D. Nguyen, Ho Viet Duc Luong, Binh P. Nguyen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

HEIST: A Graph Foundation Model for Spatial Transcriptomics and Proteomics Data

arXiv:2506. 11152v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Single-cell transcriptomics and proteomics have become a great source for data-driven insights into biology, enabling the use of advanced deep learning methods to understand cellular heterogeneity and gene expression at the single-cell level.

By Hiren Madhu, Jo\~ao Felipe Rocha, Tinglin Huang, Siddharth Viswanath, Smita Krishnaswamy, Rex Ying
arXiv AI
Oct 1

CellMSA: Context Modeling for Single-Cell Representation Learning

CellMSA introduces a novel single‑cell representation learning framework that leverages a multiple‑sequence‑alignment‑inspired context model. For each target cell, it retrieves relevant cells across batches and related cell types, summarizing cross‑cell patterns into a context‑dependent gene‑pair representation that is fed into a pair‑aware encoder. Pretraining on a massive human single‑cell corpus (≈109 million cells) and subsequent benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance gains over existing methods.

By Suyuan Zhao, Minghao Liu, Yizhen Luo, Zaiqing Nie