Atlas-level single-cell integration and clustering-free differential expression analysis with GEDI 2.0.

motivationGEDI is a generative framework for multi-sample, multi-condition single-cell analysis that performs batch correction, latent representation learning, and clustering-free differential expression within a unified model. However, the original implementation suffered from prohibitive memory use and runtime, preventing its application to modern atlas-scale datasets.

resultsWe present GEDI 2.0, a complete high-performance reimplementation featuring a standalone C++ computational core with pre-allocated workspaces, strict sparse-matrix preservation, optimized BLAS routines, and multi-threaded block-coordinate descent. Across extensive benchmarks spanning up to 500 000 cells and 10 000 features, GEDI 2.0 achieves 40%-63.6% mean reduction in peak memory, 2.98× mean single-threaded speedups, and up to 11.5× acceleration with parallel execution, while maintaining full numerical equivalence to the original method. These improvements enable GEDI 2.0 to analyze million-cell datasets, a scale not achievable with the legacy implementation. GEDI 2.0 provides R and Python interfaces and seamless interoperability with common single-cell workflows. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code, documentation, reproducible codebase, and tutorials are available at https://github.com/csglab/gedi2.