MoLF: Mixture-of-Latent-Flow for Pan-Cancer Spatial Gene Expression Prediction from Histology
Susu Hu, Stefanie Speidel
Abstract
Inferring spatial transcriptomics (ST) from histology enables scalable histogenomic profiling, yet current methods are largely restricted to singletissue 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-theart, consistently outperforming both specialized and foundation model baselines on pan-cancer benchmarks. Furthermore, MoLF exhibits zeroshot generalization to cross-species data, suggesting it captures fundamental, conserved histomolecular mechanisms. Code is available at https://susuhu.github.io/MoLF/ .
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Builds on4
- Spatially Resolved Gene Expression Prediction from Histology Images via Bi-modal Contrastive LearningRonald Xie, Kuan Pang, Sai Chung, Catia Perciani et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 125 citations
- Flow Matching for Generative ModelingYaron Lipman, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Heli Ben-Hamu, Maximilian Nickel et al.ICLR 2023 · 87 citations
- Scalable Generation of Spatial Transcriptomics from Histology Images via Whole-Slide Flow MatchingTinglin Huang, Tianyu Liu, Mehrtash Babadi, Wengong Jin et al.ICML 2025
- Accurate Spatial Gene Expression Prediction by Integrating Multi-Resolution FeaturesYoungmin Chung, Ji Hun Ha, Kyeong Chan Im, Joo Sang LeeCVPR 2024
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