Accessible and reproducible deployment reveals the practical boundaries of single-cell foundation models
Siyu Hou, Penghui Yang, Wenjing Ma, Jinxi Xiang, Jade Xiaoqing Wang, Hui Wan, Ying Ma, Xiang Zhou
Across 13 single-cell foundation models and 94 datasets, PCA and established methods usually match or beat them; pretrained embeddings help mainly with scarce labels, rare cells and open-set detection.
bioRxiv · Sep 2, 2026 · PreprintBioinformatics✦ In-depth digest