通过掩码基因表达实现有效的生物表征学习
Effective Biological Representation Learning by Masking Gene Expression
Kian Kenyon-Dean, Alina Selega, Ihab Bendidi, Jordan M. Sorokin, Luca Bertinetto, David Errington, Hayley Donnella, Oren Kraus
AI 速读 基于摘要
作者提出面向RNA-seq计数数据的自监督掩码自编码模型TxFM,并构建公开语料DiverseRNA-1.4M,报告其在基因表征迁移任务上优于规模大逾100倍的图谱级语料训练的转录组基础模型。
cs.LG
查看原文摘要
RNA sequencing produces rich and diverse datasets of gene expression, offering compelling insights into cellular state and function that have many applications in drug discovery. Modeling such data is challenging due to inherent technical noise and experimental batch effects, as evidenced by many existing transcriptomic foundation models (FMs) underperforming relative to linear baselines. Such results raise the question of whether deep representation learning provides a distinct advantage over the direct use of raw transcript counts. Our work explores this by developing a new self-supervised model, TxFM, with a focus on inductive representation learning evaluations. TxFM employs a masked autoencoding approach tailored to diverse RNA-seq count data, and our ablation study empirically identifies crucial architecture configurations required for strong transfer performance. Additionally, we curate a public training corpus, DiverseRNA-1.4M, and find that TxFM trained on this curated dataset yields high-fidelity gene representations that outperform FMs trained on atlas-scale corpora over 100x larger. Overall, our results indicate that inductive self-supervised learning is a viable modeling approach for transcriptomics representation, provided a careful synthesis of model architecture and training data curation.