arXiv:2602.07475cs.LGq-bio.GN2026-02

用锚点令牌加速大规模单细胞数据聚类,计算复杂度从平方级降到线性。

Bipartite Graph Attention-based Clustering for Large-scale scRNA-seq Data

  • 引入可学习的锚点令牌作为全局参考,构建二分图注意力机制。
  • 在多个大规模数据集上实现优于现有方法的聚类准确率,且耗时随细胞数线性增长。
  • 适合处理百万级细胞的大规模单细胞数据分析,尤其适用于资源受限场景。

单细胞RNA测序(scRNA-seq)聚类是分析基因表达模式的重要任务,旨在将表达相似的细胞分组。尽管基于Transformer的模型因自注意力机制能自动为同簇细胞分配更高权重而表现出色,但现有方法(如图Transformer)将每个细胞视为序列中的一个标记,导致计算和空间复杂度均为关于细胞数n的$/mathcal{O}(n^2)$,难以应用于大规模数据。为此,我们提出一种基于二分图注意力的聚类模型BGFormer。该模型引入一组可学习的锚点令牌作为共享参考点,通过二分图注意力机制学习细胞与锚点间的相似性,使同类细胞在嵌入空间中更接近。该方法将计算复杂度降至与细胞数线性的$/mathcal{O}(n)$,显著提升可扩展性。在多个大规模scRNA-seq数据集上的实验表明,BGFormer在聚类效果与可扩展性方面均优于现有方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

scRNA-seq clustering is a critical task for analyzing single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, as it groups cells with similar gene expression profiles. Transformers, as powerful foundational models, have been applied to scRNA-seq clustering. Their self-attention mechanism automatically assigns higher attention weights to cells within the same cluster, enhancing the distinction between clusters. Existing methods for scRNA-seq clustering, such as graph transformer-based models, treat each cell as a token in a sequence. Their computational and space complexities are $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ with respect to the number of cells, limiting their applicability to large-scale scRNA-seq datasets.To address this challenge, we propose a Bipartite Graph Transformer-based clustering model (BGFormer) for scRNA-seq data. We introduce a set of learnable anchor tokens as shared reference points to represent the entire dataset. A bipartite graph attention mechanism is introduced to learn the similarity between cells and anchor tokens, bringing cells of the same class closer together in the embedding space. BGFormer achieves linear computational complexity with respect to the number of cells, making it scalable to large datasets. Experimental results on multiple large-scale scRNA-seq datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of BGFormer.

单细胞聚类图注意力可扩展性Transformer

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