---
license: cc-by-nc-4.0
tags:
  - histopathology
  - spatial-transcriptomics
  - multimodal
  - vision-language
  - clip
  - cell-type-annotation
library_name: pytorch
pipeline_tag: zero-shot-image-classification
---

# SpatialWhisperer

SpatialWhisperer is a trimodal embedding model that aligns hematoxylin & eosin (H&E) image patches, gene-expression profiles, and free-text descriptions into a shared 2048-dimensional space. It enables zero-shot cell-type annotation of H&E patches and natural-language querying over histopathology and spatial transcriptomics data.

This repository hosts the main checkpoint (seed=0) from the ICML 2026 paper *[Transitive Representation Learning Enhances Histopathology Annotation](https://openreview.net/forum?id=Ze7U293Zw4)* (Schaefer et al., PMLR vol. 306).

## Model architecture

Three encoders project into a shared embedding space:

| Modality       | Encoder          | Freezing |
|----------------|------------------|----------|
| Image (H&E)    | UNI2             | locked   |
| Transcriptome  | Geneformer (12L) | locked   |
| Text           | BioBERT v1.1     | unfrozen |

Following LiT convention, the freezing pattern is **LUL** (image locked, text unlocked, transcriptome locked). Only the text tower and the three projection heads are trained. Projection dimension is 2048.

## Training data

Three paired datasets cover the three modality pairs:

- **HEST-1K** — H&E ↔ spatial gene expression (Visium-style spots)
- **cellxgene_census** — gene expression ↔ free-text cell/sample metadata
- **ARCHS4/GEO** — gene expression ↔ free-text sample descriptions

Training was 4 epochs with AdamW at learning rate 1e-5 and cosine schedule (warmup 3%), batch size 512, on a single H100 GPU. This checkpoint reflects epoch 3, global step 14624.

## Evaluation

Reported AUROC on cell-type benchmarks (mean across cell types):

| Benchmark | SpatialWhisperer | Best published baseline | Δ rel.  |
|-----------|------------------|-------------------------|---------|
| PathoCell | **0.630**        | 0.554                   | +13.7%  |
| Lizard    | (see paper)      | —                       | +15.9%  |
| PanNuke   | (see paper)      | —                       | +13.7%  |

Modality-pair benchmarks (Tabula Sapiens, HEST-1K, Skin Conditions) confirm the trimodal model retains per-pair performance under low-n subsampling. See the paper for full numbers.

## How to use

The checkpoint is a stripped Lightning state-dict (~505 MB, 236 tensors covering the trained BioBERT text tower and the three 2048-d projection heads) plus its `hyper_parameters` block. **Foundation model weights are NOT included** — the locked UNI2 image encoder and locked Geneformer transcriptome encoder are re-instantiated at load time from their original providers (and remain under their respective licenses). The ckpt's `hyper_parameters.model_config.use_cache = True` flag triggers the `FrozenCachedModel` wrapping that excludes the locked towers from `state_dict` during load.

Loading requires the cellwhisperer code at <https://github.com/Good-Lab/spatialwhisperer> (model code) and the foundation models (UNI2, Geneformer, BioBERT v1.1), which are downloaded by the cellwhisperer setup scripts.

```python
from cellwhisperer.utils.model_io import load_cellwhisperer_model

model, tokenizer, transcriptome_proc, image_proc = load_cellwhisperer_model(
    model_path="hf://Good-Lab/spatialwhisperer"
)
# model is a TranscriptomeTextDualEncoderLightning in eval mode
```

While the repo is private, export a token first:

```bash
export HUGGINGFACE_TOKEN=$(pass api_keys/huggingface_write)  # or any read token with access
```

To compute image–text similarities for zero-shot cell-type annotation, encode patches and class-name strings, then take cosine similarity in the shared 2048-d space. See `examples/zero_shot_celltype.py` in the model code repository.

## Intended use & limitations

**Intended.** Research on multimodal histopathology, cell-type annotation, spatial transcriptomics analysis, and natural-language querying over H&E and gene-expression data.

**Not intended.** Clinical diagnosis or treatment decisions. The model was trained on academic datasets and is not validated for clinical use.

**Known limitations.**
- Trained on Visium-scale spots (~55 μm); finer-grained image–expression alignment is not guaranteed.
- BioBERT vocabulary constrains the text tower; rare technical terms may be out-of-distribution.
- The image tower (UNI2) is locked; performance on tissue types poorly represented in UNI2's pretraining will be lower.

## File contents

- `spatialwhisperer.ckpt` — Lightning checkpoint (state_dict + hyper_parameters; optimizer/scheduler state stripped).
- `README.md` — this card.

## Citation

```bibtex
@inproceedings{schaefer2026spatialwhisperer,
  title     = {Transitive Representation Learning Enhances Histopathology Annotation},
  author    = {Schaefer, Moritz and Piran, Zoe and Walter, Nils Philipp and Awasthi, Animesh and Bock, Christoph and Leskovec, Jure and Good, Zinaida},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning},
  series    = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  volume    = {306},
  publisher = {PMLR},
  address   = {Seoul, South Korea},
  month     = jul,
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=Ze7U293Zw4}
}
```

## License

CC BY-NC 4.0 (research use). Foundation model weights (UNI2, Geneformer, BioBERT) carry their own licenses; please consult upstream repositories.