MoLF: Mixture-of-Latent-Flow for Pan-Cancer Spatial Gene Expression Prediction from Histology
Abstract
Inferring spatial transcriptomics (ST) from histology enables scalable histogenomic profiling, yet current methods are largely restricted to single-tissue 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-the-art, consistently outperforming both specialized and foundation model baselines on pan-cancer benchmarks. Furthermore, MoLF exhibits zero-shot generalization to cross-species data, suggesting it captures fundamental, conserved histo-molecular mechanisms.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
hu2026molf,
title={Mo{LF}: Mixture-of-Latent-Flow for Pan-Cancer Spatial Gene Expression Prediction from Histology},
author={Susu Hu and Stefanie Speidel},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=SNRYGh6n69}
}