LOCAS: Multi-label mRNA Localization with Supervised Contrastive Learning

Traditional methods for mRNA subcellular localization often fail to account for multiple compartmentalization. Recent multi-label models have improved performance, but still face challenges in capturing complex localization patterns. We introduce LOCAS (Localization with Supervised Contrastive Learning), which integrates an RNA language model to generate initial embeddings, employs supervised contrastive learning (SCL) to identify distinct RNA clusters, and uses a multi-label classification head (ML-Decoder) with cross-attention for accurate predictions. Through extensive ablation studies and multi-label overlapping threshold tuning, LOCAS achieves state-of-the-art performance across all metrics, providing a robust solution for RNA localization tasks.