Extrapolation Guarantees for Perturbation Modeling Under the Additive Latent Shift Assumption

ArXi:2504.18522v3 Announce Type: replace-cross We consider the problem of modeling the effects of perturbations like gene knockouts on measurements such as single-cell RNA counts. Given data for some perturbations, we aim to predict the distribution of measurements for new combinations of perturbations. To address this challenging extrapolation task, we posit that perturbations act additively in a suitable, unknown embedding space. We formulate the data-generating process as a latent variable model, in which perturbations amount to mean shifts in latent space and can be combined additively.