CP-Agent: Context-Aware Multimodal Reasoning for Cellular Morphological Profiling under Chemical Perturbations

Cell Painting combines multiplexed fluorescent staining, high-content imaging, and quantitative analysis to generate high-dimensional phenotypic readouts to support diverse downstream tasks such as mechanism-of-action (MoA) inference, toxicity prediction, and construction of drug-disease atlases. However, existing workflows are slow, costly and difficult to interpret. Approaches for drug screening modeling predominantly focus on molecular representation learning, while neglecting actual experimental context (e.g., cell line, dosing schedule, etc.), limiting generalization and MoA resolution. We introduce CP-Agent, an agentic multimodal large language model (MLLM) capable of generating mechanism-relevant, human-interpretable rationales for cell morphological changes under drug perturbations. At its core, CP-Agent leverages a context-aware alignment module, CP-CLIP, that jointly embeds high-content images and experimental metadata to enable robust treatment and MoA discrimination (achieving a maximum F1-score of 0.896). By integrating CP-CLIP outputs with agentic tool usage and reasoning, CP-Agent compiles rationales into a structured report to guide experimental design and hypothesis refinement. These capabilities highlight CP-Agent's potential to accelerate drug discovery by enabling more interpretable, scalable, and context-aware phenotypic screening -- streamlining iterative cycles of hypothesis generation in drug discovery.

SimCast: Enhancing Precipitation Nowcasting with Short-to-Long Term Knowledge Distillation

Precipitation nowcasting predicts future radar sequences based on current observations, which is a highly challenging task driven by the inherent complexity of the Earth system. Accurate nowcasting is of utmost importance for addressing various societal needs, including disaster management, agriculture, transportation, and energy optimization. As a complementary to existing non-autoregressive nowcasting approaches, we investigate the impact of prediction horizons on nowcasting models and propose SimCast, a novel training pipeline featuring a short-to-long term knowledge distillation technique coupled with a weighted MSE loss to prioritize heavy rainfall regions. Improved nowcasting predictions can be obtained without introducing additional overhead during inference. As SimCast generates deterministic predictions, we further integrate it into a diffusion-based framework named CasCast, leveraging the strengths from probabilistic models to overcome limitations such as blurriness and distribution shift in deterministic outputs. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, achieving mean CSI scores of 0.452 on SEVIR, 0.474 on HKO-7, and 0.361 on MeteoNet, which outperforms existing approaches by a significant margin.