RAGCell: Retrieval-Augmented Generation as Supervision for Versatile Single-cell Analysis

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ID: 330879
2026
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Abstract
MOTIVATION: Single-cell foundation models (scFMs) are transforming computational biology by enabling generalizable, task-agnostic representations for versatile single-cell analysis. Despite their progress in facilitating rapid deployment for downstream tasks, off-the-shelf scFMs still have some overlooked concerns: (I) (Pretraining Cost.) Pretrain-based scFMs necessitate pretraining on a vast volume of cells, rendering it draining resources in applications. (II) (Heterogeneous Gap.) Large Language Models (LLM)-based scFMs ignore the tremendous heterogeneous gap between LLM textual and raw cellular spaces, leading to insufficient capability when facing downstream tasks. RESULTS: To this end, we introduce RAGCell, a versatile single-cell analysis framework that achieves a double-win in both cost-effectiveness and high performance. The success of RAGCell lies in two key aspects: Leveraging LLMs to construct cell-level and feature-level knowledge databases, which serve as supervision signals for training the cell model and significantly reduce the training cost (>pretrain-based scFMs). Aligning cell representations with text embeddings from the bi-level knowledge databases, enabling knowledge transfer from textual spaces to cellular spaces and effectively mitigating the heterogeneous gap (>LLM-based scFMs). Through extensive experiments on six downstream single-cell analysis tasks, we demonstrate that RAGCell achieves outstanding performance compared to state-of-the-art scFMs while operating at less than ∼1/10 the cost of pretrain-based scFMs. AVAILABILITY: The source code is available at our supplementary file. Embeddings can be found in https://sites.google.com/yale.edu/scelmolib/home. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Authors Tianyu Liu, Fan Zhang, Jiayuan Chen, Kun Wang, Haoxuan Li, Shengju Qian, Zhihong Zhu, Donghao Zhou, Hao Wu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhenxi Lin, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng
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Journal BMC Bioinformatics
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/bioinformatics/btag732
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btag732
Keywords Keywords not found

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