Hi, I’m Bo Li, a Ph.D. student at the University of Macau, supervised by Prof. Bob Zhang. My research is co-supported by Prof. Qianqian Song from the University of Florida, where I collaborate on interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of AI Virtual Cell.

My research interests focus on AI Virtual Cell & Phenotypic Drug Discovery & Cell Painting. Recently, I am focusing on:

(1) Modeling virtual cells with generative models;

(2) Building large foundation models in virtual cell tasks.

🔥 News

  • 2025:  🎉🎉 happy everyday

📝 Selected Publications

ArXiv 2025
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PhenoProfiler: Advancing Morphology Representations for Image-based Drug Discovery

Code, WebServer

Bo Li, Bob Zhang, …, Qianqian Song

Under review in Nature Communications (Major Revision)

Abstract: Achieving end-to-end cell image encoding for the first time in Image-based Phenotypic Drug Discovery tasks, with performance comparable to non-end-to-end encoding while reducing inference time by approximately 40 times.

Nature Communications 2025
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SpaIM: Single-cell Spatial Transcriptomics Imputation via Style Transfer

Code

Bo Li, Ziyang Tang, …, Qianqian Song

Nature Communications 2025 (In Press)

Abstract: Predicting unmeasured gene expression in spatial transcriptomics (ST) using single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in cross-modal imputation based on style transfer concepts.

Briefings in Bioinformatics 2024
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Gene Expression Prediction from Histology Images via Hypergraph Neural Networks

Code

Bo Li, Yong Zhang, …, Qianqian Song

Briefings in Bioinformatics 2024

Abstract: Constructing a hypergraph via Euclidean distance and adjacent position weighting to exploit local correlations in cell images, enabling gene expression prediction for cells in Whole Slide Image (WSI) pathology images.

Pattern Recognition 2024
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Multi-scale Hypergraph-based Feature Alignment Network for Cell Localization

Code

Bo Li, Yong Zhang, …, Baocai Yin

Pattern Recognition 2024

Abstract: Rethinking the cell localization task from the perspective of feature alignment for the first time and proposing a multi-scale hypergraph module that significantly improves accuracy by adaptively aggregating multi-level features.

EAAI 2024
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Exponential Distance Transform Maps for Cell Localization

Code

Bo Li, Jie Chen, …, and Hong Bu

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2024

Abstract: To address the challenge of existing density maps losing cell location information in dense regions, a new exponential distance transform map is proposed to provide accurate cell location information with reasonable gradients.

EAAI 2024
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Lite-UNet: A Lightweight and Efficient Network for Cell Localization

Code

Bo Li, Yong Zhang, …, Baocai Yin

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 2024

Abstract: A lightweight and efficient cell localization model called Lite-UNet is proposed for quickly and accurately localizing cells in images to further improve the efficiency of computer-aided medicine.

TOMM 2023
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Hypergraph Association Weakly Supervised Crowd Counting

Code

Bo Li, Yong Zhang, …, Baocai Yin

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications 2023

Abstract: A novel hypergraph association module is proposed to solve the problem of uneven distribution of crowd density by encoding higher-order associations among features, which opens a new direction to solve this problem.

📖 Educations

  • 2024.08 – Present: University of Macau

    - Ph.D. candidate of Computer Science, Full Scholarship, Supervisors: Prof. Bob Zhang, Prof. Qianqian Song

  • 2021.09 - 2024.07: Beijing University of Technology

    - Master of Electronic Information, Supervisors: Prof. Yong Zhang, Prof. Baocai Yin

  • 2017.09 - 2021.07: Beijing Information Science & Technology University

    - Bachelor of Robotics Engineering, Supervisors: Prof. Hongbo Huang

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • 2024.07: Top 100 Graduates of BJUT (Top 100/6331)
  • 2024.07 & 2021.07: Excellent Graduate of Beijing
  • 2023.10: Xiaomi Scholarship
  • 2023.10 & 2022.10:The First Prize Scholarship
  • 2022.10: National Scholarship
  • 2020.12: The Second Prize of National Mathematics Competition

💻 Work Experiences

  • 2022.05 – 2023.06: Algorithm Intern: Biomedical Image Analysis, West China Hospital.

💼 Services

Reviewer: Science Advances, Briefings in Bioinformatics, BMC Biology, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IET Image Processing.

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