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Studying miRNA activity at the single-cell level presents a significant challenge due to the limitations of existing single-cell technologies in capturing miRNAs. To address this, we introduce two deep learning models: Cross-modality (CM) and single-modality (SM), both based on encoder-decoder architectures. These models predict miRNA expression at both bulk and single-cell levels using mRNA data. We evaluated the performance of CM and SM against the state-of-the-art miRSCAPE approach, using both bulk and single-cell datasets. Our results demonstrate that both CM and SM outperform miRSCAPE in accuracy. Furthermore, incorporating miRNA target information substantially enhanced performance compared to models that utilized all genes. These models provide powerful tools for predicting miRNA expression from single-cell mRNA data. 

Abstract Integrating single-cell multi-omics data is a challenging task that has led to new insights into complex cellular systems. Various computational methods have been proposed to effectively integrate these rapidly accumulating datasets, including deep learning. However, despite the proven success of deep learning in integrating multi-omics data and its better performance over classical computational methods, there has been no systematic study of its application to single-cell multi-omics data integration. To fill this gap, we conducted a literature review to explore the use of multimodal deep learning techniques in single-cell multi-omics data integration, taking into account recent studies from multiple perspectives. Specifically, we first summarized different modalities found in single-cell multi-omics data. We then reviewed current deep learning techniques for processing multimodal data and categorized deep learning-based integration methods for single-cell multi-omics data according to data modality, deep learning architecture, fusion strategy, key tasks and downstream analysis. Finally, we provided insights into using these deep learning models to integrate multi-omics data and better understand single-cell biological mechanisms.