The work presents scHPGT, a single-cell Heterogeneous Prior-Guided Transformer that integrates unpaired RNA and chromatin accessibility profiles in a shared latent space using modality-specific encoders, a prior-guided cross-modal Transformer that constrains gene-peak attention with regulatory links, and a domain-adversarial objective, improving clustering agreement, label transfer and biological structure preservation across PBMC3k, mouse spleen, CITE-seq/ASAP-seq PBMC and PBMC10k benchmarks while avoiding forced correspondence of unmatched or condition-specific states in partial-overlap and condition-shift settings, with attention-derived links recovering regulatory relationships, marker-gene regulatory regions, transcription factor programs and regulatory activity profiles.
The work presents scHPGT, a single-cell Heterogeneous Prior-Guided Transformer that integrates unpaired RNA and chromatin accessibility profiles in a shared latent space using modality-specific encoders, a prior-guided cross-modal Transformer that constrains gene-peak attention with regulatory links, and a domain-adversarial objective, improving clustering agreement, label transfer and biological structure preservation across PBMC3k, mouse spleen, CITE-seq/ASAP-seq PBMC and PBMC10k benchmarks while avoiding forced correspondence of unmatched or condition-specific states in partial-overlap and condition-shift settings, with attention-derived links recovering regulatory relationships, marker-gene regulatory regions, transcription factor programs and regulatory activity profiles.