VelOT: kinetic-free RNA velocity inference via optimal transport, flow-field smoothing, and VAMP coarse-graining of cellular dynamics (opens in new tab)

Inferring cellular dynamics from snapshot single-cell RNA sequencing remains difficult when spliced and unspliced counts are sparse or unreliable. We present VelOT, a kinetic-free RNA velocity framework that formulates dynamics as local optimal transport on the gene-expression manifold. VelOT orders cells by diffusion pseudotime, constructs overlapping spatial-temporal windows, estimates displacement vectors with entropy-regularized transport, and smooths them with a lightweight neural flow f...