ChanSFormer: A Channel Agnostic Vision Transformer for Multi-Channel Cell Painting Images

Jingwei Zhang, Srinivasan Sivanandan, Dimitris Samaras

High-content multi-channel imaging, from Cell Painting assays to remote sensing, is central to modern scientific pipelines. Because these channels are highly heterogeneous and experimental configurations frequently evolve, a practical vision backbone must be fundamentally channel-agnostic. Current channel-adaptive vision transformers rely on global self-attention with learnable channel embeddings, which can be computed only for previously known channels. Attempts to overcome this limitation of new channels either discard the embeddings, losing channel identity, or process each channel independently, thereby eliminating critical cross-channel interactions. To address this, we introduce ChanSFormer, an efficient Vision Transformer that replaces rigid embeddings with disentangled spatial-channel attention and individual channel CLS tokens. This architecture natively preserves both distinct channel identities and cross-channel information flow. Furthermore, the individual channel class token design unlocks more informative feature representations for self-supervised learning and enables representation-based channel sampling while remaining channel-agnostic. We evaluate ChanSFormer on…