Jiekun Yang


Fixing paper assignments

  1. Please select all papers that do not belong to this person.
  2. Indicate below which author they should be assigned to.
Provide a valid ORCID iD here. This will be used to match future papers to this author.
Provide the name of the school or the university where the author has received or will receive their highest degree (e.g., Ph.D. institution for researchers, or current affiliation for students). This will be used to form the new author page ID, if needed.

TODO: "submit" and "cancel" buttons here


2025

pdf bib
GRNFormer: A Biologically-Guided Framework for Integrating Gene Regulatory Networks into RNA Foundation Models
Mufan Qiu | Xinyu Hu | Fengwei Zhan | Sukwon Yun | Jie Peng | Ruichen Zhang | Bhavya Kailkhura | Jiekun Yang | Tianlong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Foundation models for single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) have shown promising capabilities in capturing gene expression patterns. However, current approaches face critical limitations: they ignore biological prior knowledge encoded in gene regulatory relationships and fail to leverage multi-omics signals that could provide complementary regulatory insights. In this paper, we propose GRNFormer, a new framework that systematically integrates multi-scale Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) inferred from multi-omics data into RNA foundation model training. Our framework introduces two key innovations. First, we introduce a pipeline for constructing hierarchical GRNs that capture regulatory relationships at both cell-type-specific and cell-specific resolutions. Second, we design a structure-aware integration framework that addresses the information asymmetry in GRNs through two technical advances: (1) A graph topological adapter using multi-head cross-attention to weight regulatory relationships dynamically, and (2) a novel edge perturbation strategy that perturb GRNs with biologically-informed co-expression links to augment graph neural network training. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on three representative downstream tasks across multiple model architectures to demonstrate the effectiveness of GRNFormer. It achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art (SoTA) baselines: 3.6\\% increase in drug response prediction correlation, 9.6\\% improvement in single-cell drug classification AUC, and 1.1\\% average gain in gene perturbation prediction accuracy.