Joint Flow Matching Enables Continuous Dose-Conditioned Cell Morphing
2026-08-17 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed a new method to predict how cells change when treated with different doses of a drug. Unlike previous models that either ignored exact doses or treated doses as separate groups, their method models both the cell's state and drug dose together continuously. This lets them smoothly change cell features based on drug concentration and even estimate the dose from cell appearance. They tested their method on two drugs and found it worked as well or better than existing methods, including for doses the model hadn't seen before.
generative modelingcell perturbationdrug concentrationflow matchinglatent spacedose-responsesingle-cell morphologyinvertible modelsdose estimationcontinuous dose control
Authors
Lea Bogensperger, Manuela Merlo, Martin Baumgartner, Michael Krauthammer, Bernard Ciraulo
Abstract
Generative modeling has shown increasing promise for predicting cellular perturbation effects under chemical compound treatments. Existing approaches either model perturbation as a distribution-to-distribution mapping without explicit concentration handling, or treat concentration as a discrete class label, precluding continuous dose control. We introduce a joint flow matching approach that simultaneously models cell latents and drug concentration via a dual-timestep formulation, enabling dose-conditioned single-cell morphing through the invertibility of flow matching. The joint formulation induces a monotonic dose-response geometry in latent space and additionally supports concentration estimation from cell morphology. As proof of concept, we further demonstrate generalization to an unseen dose held out during training. Empirically, our method achieves competitive or improved per-concentration metrics on two compounds compared with representative baselines, while enabling capabilities structurally unavailable to discrete-class methods.