破解单细胞测序模型黑箱,让生物发现可解释。
Discovering Interpretable Biological Concepts in Single-cell RNA-seq Foundation Models
- 用反事实扰动法识别影响概念激活的关键基因,突破相关性分析局限。
- 在两个免疫细胞数据集上提取出可解释的生物概念,与专家知识高度一致。
- 适合生物学家和算法研究者,助力生成新假设和发现新机制。
单细胞RNA测序基础模型在下游任务中表现优异,但仍是黑箱,限制了其在生物发现中的应用。现有研究显示稀疏字典学习可从深度模型中提取概念,已在医学影像和蛋白质模型中取得进展。然而,由于生物序列本身不具人类可读性,解释生物概念仍具挑战。本文提出一种面向单细胞测序模型的概念可解释性框架,聚焦概念的识别与评估。设计基于反事实扰动的归因方法,识别影响概念激活的关键基因,超越传统的差异表达分析。提供两种互补的解释路径:由领域专家通过交互界面进行分析,以及基于归因的通路富集分析。将该框架应用于两个文献中的经典单细胞测序模型,在两个免疫细胞数据集上训练的Top-K稀疏自编码器提取的概念进行分析。经免疫学专家验证,所提取概念比单个神经元更具可解释性,同时保留了潜在表示的丰富信息。本工作为理解基础模型编码的生物知识提供了系统性框架,推动其在假说生成与发现中的应用。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Single-cell RNA-seq foundation models achieve strong performance on downstream tasks but remain black boxes, limiting their utility for biological discovery. Recent work has shown that sparse dictionary learning can extract concepts from deep learning models, with promising applications in biomedical imaging and protein models. However, interpreting biological concepts remains challenging, as biological sequences are not inherently human-interpretable. We introduce a novel concept-based interpretability framework for single-cell RNA-seq models with a focus on concept interpretation and evaluation. We propose an attribution method with counterfactual perturbations that identifies genes that influence concept activation, moving beyond correlational approaches like differential expression analysis. We then provide two complementary interpretation approaches: an expert-driven analysis facilitated by an interactive interface and an ontology-driven method with attribution-based biological pathway enrichment. Applying our framework to two well-known single-cell RNA-seq models from the literature, we interpret concepts extracted by Top-K Sparse Auto-Encoders trained on two immune cell datasets. With a domain expert in immunology, we show that concepts improve interpretability compared to individual neurons while preserving the richness and informativeness of the latent representations. This work provides a principled framework for interpreting what biological knowledge foundation models have encoded, paving the way for their use for hypothesis generation and discovery.
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