MoLF: Mixture-of-Latent-Flow for Pan-Cancer Spatial Gene Expression Prediction from Histology
This addresses the challenge of scalable histogenomic profiling for cancer research by leveraging shared biological principles across tissues, though it is incremental as it builds on existing generative and mixture-of-experts methods.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting spatial gene expression from histology across multiple cancer types, introducing MoLF, a generative model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on pan-cancer benchmarks and demonstrates zero-shot generalization to cross-species data.
Inferring spatial transcriptomics (ST) from histology enables scalable histogenomic profiling, yet current methods are largely restricted to single-tissue models. This fragmentation fails to leverage biological principles shared across cancer types and hinders application to data-scarce scenarios. While pan-cancer training offers a solution, the resulting heterogeneity challenges monolithic architectures. To bridge this gap, we introduce MoLF (Mixture-of-Latent-Flow), a generative model for pan-cancer histogenomic prediction. MoLF leverages a conditional Flow Matching objective to map noise to the gene latent manifold, parameterized by a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) velocity field. By dynamically routing inputs to specialized sub-networks, this architecture effectively decouples the optimization of diverse tissue patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that MoLF establishes a new state-of-the-art, consistently outperforming both specialized and foundation model baselines on pan-cancer benchmarks. Furthermore, MoLF exhibits zero-shot generalization to cross-species data, suggesting it captures fundamental, conserved histo-molecular mechanisms.