BioM-JEPA Predicts Gene Blocks in Single-Cell Transcriptomes.

Yuhao Wang, Zelin Zang, Yuxuan Liu, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li· August 7, 2026 View original

Key takeaways

  • BioM-JEPA uses graph-connected gene blocks for single-cell representation learning.
  • The model employs a student-teacher architecture for robust prediction.
  • It achieves higher effective rank embeddings and improved performance in biological tasks.
  • Linear attention provides significant computational efficiency gains.

Who benefits

BiotechnologyPharmaceuticalsHealthcareAcademia

Summary

BioM-JEPA is a new joint-embedding predictive architecture that learns representations of graph-connected gene blocks in single cells, improving upon traditional gene-level reconstruction. It uses a student-teacher network to predict aggregate representations, yielding more robust and informative embeddings for single-cell biology.

Researchers have introduced BioM-JEPA, a novel joint-embedding predictive architecture designed to analyze single-cell transcriptomes more effectively. Unlike previous models that focus on individual gene reconstruction, BioM-JEPA predicts aggregate representations of gene blocks connected by protein association and coexpression evidence. This approach leverages a student-teacher network, where the student infers block representations from partial gene sets, guided by a teacher network providing full representations. The model's block-level prediction strategy has shown superior performance in generating embeddings with higher effective rank and reduced association with detected-gene depth compared to other methods. In various CellBench tasks, BioM-JEPA embeddings retained crucial biological information and achieved lower perturbation-response error. Its linear attention mechanism also offers significant throughput advantages over existing models like scFoundation.

Why it matters

This research offers a more robust and efficient method for analyzing complex single-cell data, potentially accelerating drug discovery and personalized medicine by providing deeper insights into cellular programs.

How to implement this in your domain

  1. 1Integrate BioM-JEPA into single-cell analysis pipelines for improved gene block representation learning.
  2. 2Apply the model to existing single-cell RNA sequencing datasets to uncover novel biological insights.
  3. 3Collaborate with research teams to validate BioM-JEPA's utility in specific disease contexts or drug screens.
  4. 4Develop downstream applications that leverage the higher-quality embeddings for cell type classification or trajectory inference.

Original post by Yuhao Wang, Zelin Zang, Yuxuan Liu, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li

"arXiv:2608.05928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-cell transcriptomes are sparse observations of coordinated biological programmes, yet most self-supervised models learn by reconstructing individual genes. Here we present BioM-JEPA, a joint-embedding predictive architecture…"

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Originally posted by Yuhao Wang, Zelin Zang, Yuxuan Liu, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li on X · view source

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