Wei Lan

Wei Lan, Guohang He, Mingyang Liu et al.

The transformers have achieved significant accomplishments in the natural language processing as its outstanding parallel processing capabilities and highly flexible attention mechanism. In addition, increasing studies based on transformers have been proposed to model single-cell data. In this review, we attempt to systematically summarize the single-cell language models and applications based on transformers. First, we provide a detailed introduction about the structure and principles of transformers. Then, we review the single-cell language models and large language models for single-cell data analysis. Moreover, we explore the datasets and applications of single-cell language models in downstream tasks such as batch correction, cell clustering, cell type annotation, gene regulatory network inference and perturbation response. Further, we discuss the challenges of single-cell language models and provide promising research directions. We hope this review will serve as an up-to-date reference for researchers interested in the direction of single-cell language models.

Zongcai Tan, Lan Wei, Dandan Zhang

Precise pose estimation of optical microrobots is essential for enabling high-precision object tracking and autonomous biological studies. However, current methods rely heavily on large, high-quality microscope image datasets, which are difficult and costly to acquire due to the complexity of microrobot fabrication and the labour-intensive labelling. Digital twin systems offer a promising path for sim-to-real data augmentation, yet existing techniques struggle to replicate complex optical microscopy phenomena, such as diffraction artifacts and depth-dependent imaging.This work proposes a novel physics-informed deep generative learning framework that, for the first time, integrates wave optics-based physical rendering and depth alignment into a generative adversarial network (GAN), to synthesise high-fidelity microscope images for microrobot pose estimation efficiently. Our method improves the structural similarity index (SSIM) by 35.6% compared to purely AI-driven methods, while maintaining real-time rendering speeds (0.022 s/frame).The pose estimator (CNN backbone) trained on our synthetic data achieves 93.9%/91.9% (pitch/roll) accuracy, just 5.0%/5.4% (pitch/roll) below that of an estimator trained exclusively on real data. Furthermore, our framework generalises to unseen poses, enabling data augmentation and robust pose estimation for novel microrobot configurations without additional training data.