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arXiv · 2605.07938

Prototype Guided Post-pretraining for Single-Cell Representation Learning

Sachini Weerasekara·Natasha Darras·Sagar Kamarthi·Colles Price·Jacqueline Isaacs
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Abstract

Single-cell representation learning (SCRL) from gene expression data offers a way to uncover the complex regulatory logic underlying cellular function. Inspired by large language models in natural language modeling, several single-cell pretrained models have recently been proposed that treat genes as tokens and cells as sentences. However, these models are fundamentally limited by the long-tailed nature of cell-type distributions and struggle to generalize under covariate shifts in gene expression data. While fine-tuning is often used to mitigate these issues, we observe that performance remains bounded. To address this challenge, we introduce CellRefine, a post-pretraining method that operates between the pretraining and fine-tuning stages of a single-cell foundation model. CellRefine uses a multi-faceted objective that incorporates marker-gene sets as structural priors to guide post-pretraining and refine the latent embedding manifold of cells. Across multiple computational biology tasks, empirical results show that CellRefine consistently improves downstream performance, yielding gains up to 15%.

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Sachini Weerasekara, Natasha Darras, Sagar Kamarthi, Colles Price, Jacqueline Isaacs. 2026-05-08. Prototype Guided Post-pretraining for Single-Cell Representation Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07938

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