Unbalanced Perturbation Dynamics For Cell Fate Design
Large-scale single-cell perturbation sequencing provides an unprecedented opportunity to construct virtual cells for the in silico simulation of cellular responses and the inverse design of optimal interventions. However, most perturbation-response models treat cellular responses primarily as mass-preserving shifts in transcriptomic state, whereas single-cell perturbation measurements are inherently unbalanced: the recovered endpoint population is shaped by technical sampling as well as biological perturbation-induced proliferation, apoptosis and selection. Here we introduce U-Pert, an unbalanced generative framework that learns condition- and context-dependent perturbation dynamics from unpaired single-cell snapshots. U-Pert jointly models transcriptomic state transitions and cell-number dynamics, enabling scalable and robust forward prediction of unseen perturbations and contexts, as well as inverse design to screen for desired genetic or pharmacological interventions that achieve user-defined transcriptomic or population-level outcomes. Across controlled simulations, genetic perturbation benchmarks, sciPlex3 drug responses and PBMC cytokine perturbations, U-Pert predicts unseen responses, captures both molecular and abundance changes, and performs inverse design for target gene-expression programs and cell-type compositions. These results show that cell abundance is an integral component of the perturbation phenotype, providing a mass-aware framework for virtual-cell modeling and perturbation cell fate design.