Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade

I am a PhD student in Prof. Marianna Rapsomaniki's AI/ML For Biomedicine group at CHUV, Lausanne, working on drug perturbations, causality and generative modelling for biology. I graduated in May '25 with an Integrated Master's in Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.

Before that I worked with Prof. Koel Chaudhury and Prof. Soumya De at IIT Kharagpur, with Prof. Brian Ingalls at the University of Waterloo (2023), and with Dr. Shengchao Liu at Caltech (2024) on Protein-DNA interactions. My Master's thesis extended that work to discrete diffusion for de novo DNA-binding protein design; some designs expressed well in the lab, and the project continues in Prof. Riddhiman Dhar's group at IIT Kharagpur.

I am a recipient of the Caltech SURF fellowship (2024) and the MITACS Globalink Research Internship (2023), and was selected for the EPFL E3 scholarship (2024) and the ThinkSwiss Research scholarship (2023).

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Research

Currently: problems where biology has a spatial structure — spatial omics over tissue slides, with a dash of organoids — and generative models that predict how cells respond to perturbation. Both come down to the same question for me: can a model reason its way to an answer, refining it over the structure of a tissue or the context of a treatment, rather than reading it off in a single shot?

More broadly, I am interested in generative modelling and reasoning for biological problems, spatial omics, learning from patient data, and perturbation prediction, alongside gene regulation, biological systems, and the mathematical modelling of biological networks and dynamics. Most of my work has involved applying robust learning methods to biological problems in an interpretable manner. Apart from Biology, I am keenly interested in and have also worked in Deep Learning for Vision (specifically SSL and Generative modelling), as well as Causal Inference and Graph Learning.

News

  [Aug 2026] I gave a talk on Tiny Recursive Models for spatial omics at the Multiomics Reading Group.
  [Jul 2026] Our work on Tiny Recursive Models for spatial omics was accepted at the ICML 2026 Foundations of Deep Generative Models workshop in Seoul.
  [Jun 2026] Our paper on the Conditional Monge Gap for generalizable single-cell perturbation modelling is out in Nature Machine Intelligence.
  [May 2025] Some early work from my Master's thesis was accepted as a poster at the AI Bio X conference at Sanger, Cambridgeshire. See you in the UK!
  [Dec 2024] Our paper on backdoor and adversarial attacks targetting SSL was accepted at ICASSP 2025. See you at Hyderabad!
  [Nov 2024] Our work on understanding Protein-DNA interactions using Protein and Genomics Foundation models was accepted at the MLSB, FM4Science and AIDrugX workshops, NeurIPS 2024.

Publications

[Note: Highlighted papers indicate first authorship; (*) indicates equal contribution].

Spatial domains refined over recursion steps Reasoning Across Space: Tiny Recursive Models for Spatial Omics
Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade, Marianna Rapsomaniki
ICML 2026 Foundations of Deep Generative Models workshop, 2026
Paper / Talk

A 7M-parameter Tiny Recursive Model that refines its own answer over a tissue slide, instead of scaling depth or parameters. Recursion over space lets the same small block improve spatial domain assignments step by step, beating parameter-matched non-recursive baselines on all 12 held-out slices zero-shot, and giving the best supervised histology-to-expression results in our setting. Animation shows predicted cortical layers sharpening as the number of latent recursion steps grows.

Conditional Monge Gap schematic Conditional Monge Gap enables generalizable single-cell perturbation modelling
Alice Driessen, Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade, Benedek Harsanyi, Marianna Rapsomaniki, Jannis Born
Nature Machine Intelligence (Journal), 2026
Paper / arXiv / Code

Neural optimal transport handles the unpaired data that single-cell perturbation screens produce, but most OT maps cannot condition on the treatment context. We propose the Conditional Monge Gap, which learns OT maps conditioned on arbitrary covariates (drug, dosage, cell type, or combinations). Aggregating across conditions turns this into cross-task learning, unlocking strong generalization to unseen drugs and dosages and capturing the heterogeneity of the perturbed population far better than other conditional models.

Protein-DNA interaction GIF Understanding Protein-DNA Interactions by Paying Attention to Protein and Genomics Foundation Models
Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade, Erica Wang, Aryan Satpathy, Alex Brace, Hongyu Guo, Arvind Ramanathan, Shengchao Liu, Anima Anandkumar
NeurIPS 2024 Foundation Models For Science, AI for New Drug Modalities, Machine Learning in Structural Biology workshops, 2024
Paper / Code

Cross-Attention coupled with Protein and Genomics Foundation models to understand Protein-DNA interactions speeds up inference and achieves State-of-the-art performance in predicting contacts in Protein-DNA complexes (using purely sequence data for inference).

Backdoor attack visualization Towards Backdoor Mitigation and Adversarial Robustness in SSL
Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade*, Aryan Satpathy*, Nilaksh*
ICASSP 2025
Paper / Code

An intuitively elegant and simple defense strategy to defend against standard SSL augmentation invariant frequency based backdoor attacks. Taking a leaf out of frequency domain attacks, we also use frequency domain patching to increase model robustness in SSL.

FTIR spectroscopy data GIF Attenuated Total Reflectance–Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) Spectroscopy Combined With Deep Learning for Classification of Idiopathic Recurrent Spontaneous Miscarriage (IRSM)
Dadoma Sherpa, Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade, Imon Mitra, Souvik Biswas, Sunita Sharma, Pratip Chakraborty, Shovandeb Kalapahar, Ratna Chattopadhyay, Koel Chaudhury
Analytical Letters (Journal), 2024
Paper / Code

An extension of our previous work (see below) on using (ATR-FTIR)Spectroscopy and Deep Learning for prediction of Idiopathic Recurrent Spontaneous Miscarriage (IRSM). This work focuses on the classification of IRSM using ATR-FTIR Spectroscopy, which is a non-invasive and cost-effective technique and improves on our previous work on using Raman Spectroscopy in a similar problem setting.

Cells2Vec representation learning GIF Cells2Vec: Bridging the gap between experiments and simulations using causal representation learning
Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade, Atiyeh Ahmadi, Brian Ingalls
NeurIPS 2023 Causal Representation Learning Workshop, 2023
Paper / Poster / Code / Slides / Talk

Learning meaningful representations of multi-cell timeseries (Cellmodeller) simulations using causal representation learning. Current work includes extending this to real-world data, and for proxy-simulation generation for biological experiments.

Raman spectroscopy data Prediction of Idiopathic Recurrent Spontaneous Miscarriage using Machine Learning [Best Paper Award]
Dadoma Sherpa, Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade, Imon Mitra, Dhruba Dhar, Sunita Sharma, Pratip Chakraborty, Koel Chaudhury
IEEE International Conference on Computer, Electrical & Communication Engineering, 2023
Paper / Code

Using Raman Spectroscopy and Machine Learning for prediction of Idiopathic Recurrent Spontaneous Miscarriage (IRSM). Improved this work using ATR-FTIR Spectroscopy in a follow-up study, and currently working on a multi-omics approach to the same problem.

Meta-analysis chart Risk factors associated with mortality in hypersensitivity pneumonitis: a meta-analysis
Sanjukta Dasgupta, Anandita Bhattacharya, Dhruva Abhijit Rajwade, Sushmita Roy Chowdhury, Koel Chaudhury
Expert Review of Respiratory Medicine (Journal), 2022
Paper / Code

Using different statistical tests and empirical analyses to identify risk factors associated with mortality in Hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a rare lung disease. Checking for Publication bias and heterogeneity in the data, and using meta-analysis to combine results from different studies.

Past Projects

Generated protein structures Discrete Diffusion For Tunable DNA-binding Protein Design
[Slides]

Can you design a protein to bind a stretch of DNA of your choosing? My Master's thesis argued that you can get surprisingly far by learning the distribution of DNA-binding protein sequences with a discrete diffusion model, and then steering it at sampling time with Seq2Contact as the guidance signal. The nice thing about that framing is how many design problems it absorbs: inpainting a DNA-binding domain between existing functional domains, CRISPR-Cas design, or running the whole thing backwards to ask which DNA a given protein would prefer. Some of the designs went on to express in the lab. In collaboration with Prof. Riddhiman Dhar at IIT Kharagpur; the image shows ESMFold structures of sampled (not cherry-picked) sequences, coloured by confidence.

CAP-cAMP system visualization Finding Allosteric Networks in the CAP-cAMP system using Deep Learning and Molecular Dynamics
[Slides]

When cAMP binds CAP, the protein rearranges somewhere else entirely, and transcription follows. The question here was whether that line of communication can be read off the dynamics rather than guessed at from structure: simulate the complex, then look for residues that move together. Three candidate allosteric networks fell out, via AlloReverse. The harder version — learning the dynamics directly, so that allosteric discovery generalises past one system — is still open. In collaboration with Prof. Soumya De at IIT Kharagpur.

Miscellaneous

Lung segmentation and classification GIF Lung Segmentation and Disease Classification using Deep Learning
[Code]

Worked on using the Geneva HRCT dataset to segment lungs and classify diseases using Deep Learning. The final model uses a U-Net architecture for segmentation and a CNN for classification. The model was trained on a subset of the dataset and tested on CT scan images obtained externally through collaborations with Hospitals.

Functional network analysis of calcium ion pathways Functional Network Analysis of Calcium ion pathways in beta-islets of the Pancreas
[Code]

Worked on using Calcium ion imaging time-series data to extract functional networks in beta-islets of the pancreas. Used Voronoi Delaunay triangulation (see image) to extract the network, and used graph theory to analyze the network. Code is incomplete and will be updated soon.


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