English

CellPainTR: Generalizable Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset Cell Painting Analysis

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-09-10 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Large-scale biological discovery requires integrating massive, heterogeneous datasets like those from the JUMP Cell Painting consortium, but technical batch effects and a lack of generalizable models remain critical roadblocks. To address this, we introduce CellPainTR, a Transformer-based architecture designed to learn foundational representations of cellular morphology that are robust to batch effects. Unlike traditional methods that require retraining on new data, CellPainTR's design, featuring source-specific context tokens, allows for effective out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to entirely unseen datasets without fine-tuning. We validate CellPainTR on the large-scale JUMP dataset, where it outperforms established methods like ComBat and Harmony in both batch integration and biological signal preservation. Critically, we demonstrate its robustness through a challenging OOD task on the unseen Bray et al. dataset, where it maintains high performance despite significant domain and feature shifts. Our work represents a significant step towards creating truly foundational models for image-based profiling, enabling more reliable and scalable cross-study biological analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.06986,
  title  = {CellPainTR: Generalizable Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset Cell Painting Analysis},
  author = {Cedric Caruzzo and Jong Chul Ye},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.06986},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 4 figures. Code available at: https://github.com/CellPainTR/CellPainTR

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:27:00.743Z