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Unlocking biological insight from single-cell data with an interpretable dual-stream foundation model

Guo, H.; Cui, Q.; Zhang, X.; Chen, C.; Zheng, W.; Cai, C.; Wang, X.; Wang, S.

2025-09-11 bioinformatics
10.1101/2025.09.05.674596 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Deep learning foundation models are revolutionizing single-cell biology, yet learning holistic and discriminative representations from complex, high-dimensional data remains a central challenge. Although Transformer-based single-cell language models have shown significant progress, they typically rely on a single input-encoding scheme, a practice that results in the loss of critical gene expression information and hinders the effective learning of global cellular representations. To address these challenges, we introduce scDMC, an innovative single-cell Dual-stream Masked Contrastive pre-training framework designed to synergistically optimize information fidelity at both the gene and cellular levels. Pre-trained on only 2 million cells far fewer than the datasets used by mainstream models, scDMC sets a new state-of-the-art in multiple benchmark tasks, including cell annotation, clustering, and data integration. More importantly, we demonstrate that scDMC can uncover functional gene modules, infer cell-type-specific regulatory networks in a data-driven manner, and exhibits a high degree of biological interpretability.

Published in Genome Biology (predicted rank #5) · training set

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