Discovering Latent Scientific Concepts through Discrete Representation Learning

Abstract

Scientific imaging is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Advances in multiplex immunofluorescence, computational pathology, and electron microscopy now enable observation of biological and physical systems at unprecedented spatial resolution. Rather than simply classifying known objects, these data offer the opportunity to discover previously unknown organizational principles. However, scientific image datasets are typically highly curated, information-rich, and limited in size, making reliable representation learning particularly challenging. We show that standard continuous self-supervised adaptation can become unstable in this regime, allowing teacher representations to drift and degrading downstream transfer. We introduce Kodiak, a discrete representation learning architecture that discovers latent scientific concepts through Sinkhorn-balanced codebook assignments. Instead of learning unconstrained continuous embeddings, Kodiak constructs a reusable vocabulary of discrete concepts that provides stable supervision for both masked-patch prediction and cross-view representation learning within a single-stage framework. Across five scientific imaging domains, including multiplex immunofluorescence for pancreatic cancer pathology and scanning electron microscopy, Kodiak consistently improves representation quality under both continued foundation-model adaptation and training from scratch. Beyond improved classification and transfer,the learned concepts are interpretable, reusable, and produce spatially coherent concept maps that support applications such as cell phenotyping, segmentation-free patch phenotyping, spatial niche discovery, tissue organization, and materials characterization. We view Kodiak as the representation-learning engine of our foundation model for spatial biology. More broadly, our results suggest that discrete representation learning provides a principled foundation for discovering reusable latent scientific concepts that can accelerate scientific interpretation across imaging domains.