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arXiv · 2508.02276

CellForge: Agentic Design of Virtual Cell Models

Xiangru Tang·Zhuoyun Yu·Jiapeng Chen·Yan Cui·Daniel Shao·Weixu Wang·Fang Wu·Yuchen Zhuang·Wenqi Shi·Zhi Huang·Arman Cohan·Xihong Lin·Fabian Theis·Smita Krishnaswamy·Mark Gerstein
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Abstract

Virtual cell modeling aims to predict cellular responses to diverse perturbations but faces challenges from biological complexity, multimodal data heterogeneity, and the need for interdisciplinary expertise. We introduce CellForge, a multi-agent framework that autonomously designs and synthesizes neural network architectures tailored to specific single-cell datasets and perturbation tasks. Given raw multi-omics data and task descriptions, CellForge discovers candidate architectures through collaborative reasoning among specialized agents, then generates executable implementations. Our core contribution is the framework itself: showing that multi-agent collaboration mechanisms - rather than manual human design or single-LLM prompting - can autonomously produce executable, high-quality computational methods. This approach goes beyond conventional hyperparameter tuning by enabling entirely new architectural components such as trajectory-aware encoders and perturbation diffusion modules to emerge from agentic deliberation. We evaluate CellForge on six datasets spanning gene knockouts, drug treatments, and cytokine stimulations across multiple modalities (scRNA-seq, scATAC-seq, CITE-seq). The results demonstrate that the models generated by CellForge are highly competitive with established baselines, while revealing systematic patterns of architectural innovation. CellForge highlights the scientific value of multi-agent frameworks: collaboration among specialized agents enables genuine methodological innovation and executable solutions that single agents or human experts cannot achieve. This represents a paradigm shift toward autonomous scientific method development in computational biology. Code is available at https://github.com/gersteinlab/CellForge.

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Xiangru Tang, Zhuoyun Yu, Jiapeng Chen, Yan Cui, Daniel Shao, Weixu Wang, Fang Wu, Yuchen Zhuang, Wenqi Shi, Zhi Huang, Arman Cohan, Xihong Lin, Fabian Theis, Smita Krishnaswamy, Mark Gerstein. 2026-02-04. CellForge: Agentic Design of Virtual Cell Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02276

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