Yicong Mao | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

CellDETR: A Detection-Guided Framework for Scalable Cell Representation Learning from Histopathology Images

Recent advances in pathology foundation models have substantially improved patch and slide level representation learning from whole-slide images (WSIs).However, cell-level representations learning remain underexplored, limiting cell resolved interpretability, biological discovery, and clinical translation. We propose CellDETR, a detection-guided framework built on Deformable DETR for scalable cell representation learning from WSIs. By introducing location feature decoupling and box-constrained attention mechanism, CellDETR enables automated extraction of cell-level embeddings, and outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in supervised cell classification on PanNuke data. In addition, by incorporating contrastive learning design, we build a CellDETR-based pretraining model for scalable cell representation learning from unlabeled WSIs, which improves downstream cell classification performance. Furthermore, we show that after pretraining with Xenium spatial transcriptomics-derived cell annotations, CellDETR achieves accurate cross-dataset cell classification, demonstrating the transferability and biological relevance of the learned cell embeddings. Together, CellDETR provides a scalable route toward general cell-level representation learning framework for interpretable computational patholog

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ARTreeFormer: A Faster Attention-based Autoregressive Model for Phylogenetic Inference

Probabilistic modeling over the combinatorially large space of tree topologies remains a central challenge in phylogenetic inference. Previous approaches often necessitate pre-sampled tree topologies, limiting their modeling capability to a subset of the entire tree space. A recent advancement is ARTree, a deep autoregressive model that offers unrestricted distributions for tree topologies. However, its reliance on repetitive tree traversals and inefficient local message passing for computing topological node representations may hamper the scalability to large datasets. This paper proposes ARTreeFormer, a novel approach that harnesses fixed-point iteration and attention mechanisms to accelerate ARTree. By introducing a fixed-point iteration algorithm for computing the topological node embeddings, ARTreeFormer allows fast vectorized computation, especially on CUDA devices. This, together with an attention-based global message passing scheme, significantly improves the computation speed of ARTree while maintaining great approximation performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method on a benchmark of challenging real data phylogenetic inference problems.

q-bio.PE↗