arXiv Machine Learning

A vision foundation model for single-cell biology via spatial gene cartography

arXiv:2607. 14163v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most single-cell foundation models are adapted from language models, representing each cell as a sequence of gene tokens.

arXiv AI
Jul 28

scMIR: a vision-language foundation model for single-cell light microscopy image representation

arXiv:2607. 22712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-cell light microscopy images have become an important data source for characterizing cell phenotypes, but their complexity and heterogeneity pose challenges to high-throughput automated analysis.

By Yifan Shang (Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, China), Jiahui Tan (College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, China), Xiangxiang Zeng (College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, China), Renjie Zhou (Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China)
arXiv AI
3d ago

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
arXiv AI
3d ago

scTrilemma: Balancing Identity, Invariance, and Fidelity in Single-Cell Representation Learning

The paper introduces scTrilemma, a latent-bottleneck variational autoencoder designed to address the representation trilemma in single‑cell RNA‑seq data: preserving biological identity and state, remaining robust to nuisance context, and retaining gene‑level variation for expression analysis. scTrilemma routes expression‑derived variation to the embedding, decoder, or prior, gating gene tokens by expression and conditioning the prior on unlabeled pseudo‑bulk context, all under a single reconstruction objective without target annotations. In zero‑shot evaluations on successive CZ CELLxGENE Census releases, scTrilemma simultaneously satisfies all three demands, maintaining biological state, differential‑expression, and pathway structure across multiple disease settings, and latent interventions show context can be removed with minimal impact on other demands.

By Yunhak Oh, Yoonho Lee, Junseok Lee, Namkyeong Lee, Sang-Yeon Hwang, Yinhua Piao, Hyomin Kim, Seonghwan Kim, Jaechang Lim, Woo Youn Kim, Sungsoo Ahn, Chanyoung Park
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Integrating gene regulatory priors into Transformer attention with scTransformer for interpretable scRNA-seq analysis

arXiv:2606. 09558v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivation: Transformer-based models are increasingly applied to large-scale single-cell transcriptomics, showing strong performance through self-supervised learning on millions of cells.

By Mikele Milia, Louis Fabrice Tshimanga, Henning Mueller, Manfredo Atzori, Barbara Di Camillo
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
Jun 2

GC-MoE: Genomics-Guided Cell-Type-Specific Mixture of Experts for Histology-Based Single-Cell Spatial Transcriptomics

arXiv:2606. 02424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Histology-based single-cell spatial transcriptomics (ST) estimation aims to predict gene expression for individual cells from histopathological images and cell locations, reducing the need for costly single-cell ST measurements.

By Kaito Shiku, Ahtisham Fazeel Abbasi, Ryoma Bise, Yuichiro Iwashita, Kazuya Nishimura, Andreas Dengel, Muhammad Nabeel Asim