Intervention-Aware Multiscale Representation Learning from Imaging Phenomics and Perturbation Transcriptomics

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Autori principali: Chen, Jiayuan, Liu, Ruoqi, Gu, Zishan, Zhang, Ping
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Chen, Jiayuan
Liu, Ruoqi
Gu, Zishan
Zhang, Ping
author_facet Chen, Jiayuan
Liu, Ruoqi
Gu, Zishan
Zhang, Ping
contents Microscopy-based phenotypic profiling is scalable for drug discovery but lacks the mechanistic depth of transcriptomics, which remains costly and scarce. Existing multimodal approaches either use images to support other modalities or naively align representations by sample identity, ignoring cell-type and dose variations in weakly paired data-limiting generalization to unseen interventions. In this paper, we introduce an intervention-aware distillation framework that leverages perturbational transcriptomics to guide image representation learning. A transcriptome-conditioned teacher integrates gene expression and intervention metadata to produce soft distributions over a chemistry-aware codebook organized by drug similarity. The teacher employs a fine-tuned single-cell foundation model to encode cell-type context and disentangle dose effects. An image-only student learns to predict these distributions from microscopy alone, distilling mechanistic knowledge while operating independently at test time. This design emphasizes intervention semantics rather than identity alignment and explicitly handles dose and cell-type mismatches. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that transcriptomic guidance tightens the risk bound for image-based prediction. On Cell Painting and RxRx datasets paired with L1000, our method significantly improves one-shot transfer to unseen interventions and drug-target gene discovery compared to self-supervised and alignment baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_22832
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Intervention-Aware Multiscale Representation Learning from Imaging Phenomics and Perturbation Transcriptomics
Chen, Jiayuan
Liu, Ruoqi
Gu, Zishan
Zhang, Ping
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Microscopy-based phenotypic profiling is scalable for drug discovery but lacks the mechanistic depth of transcriptomics, which remains costly and scarce. Existing multimodal approaches either use images to support other modalities or naively align representations by sample identity, ignoring cell-type and dose variations in weakly paired data-limiting generalization to unseen interventions. In this paper, we introduce an intervention-aware distillation framework that leverages perturbational transcriptomics to guide image representation learning. A transcriptome-conditioned teacher integrates gene expression and intervention metadata to produce soft distributions over a chemistry-aware codebook organized by drug similarity. The teacher employs a fine-tuned single-cell foundation model to encode cell-type context and disentangle dose effects. An image-only student learns to predict these distributions from microscopy alone, distilling mechanistic knowledge while operating independently at test time. This design emphasizes intervention semantics rather than identity alignment and explicitly handles dose and cell-type mismatches. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that transcriptomic guidance tightens the risk bound for image-based prediction. On Cell Painting and RxRx datasets paired with L1000, our method significantly improves one-shot transfer to unseen interventions and drug-target gene discovery compared to self-supervised and alignment baselines.
title Intervention-Aware Multiscale Representation Learning from Imaging Phenomics and Perturbation Transcriptomics
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22832