A cancer cell treated with chemotherapy will eventually die by apoptosis or escape by dividing. These two fates look identical under a microscope for most of the cell’s remaining life. The morphological differences that distinguish them are subtle and transient — a slight change in shape, a flicker of fluorescence.

A transformer model trained on live-cell video (arXiv:2603.16562) predicts which fate a cell will choose with 94% accuracy — and can make the prediction up to 10 hours before the event occurs. The attention maps reveal when the model looks: for apoptosis, the signal is distributed across the trajectory; for mitosis, it concentrates in specific windows.

The through-claim: the cell has decided long before it acts, and the decision is written in its shape. Not as a single moment of commitment but as a pattern of morphological changes that the cell accumulates over hours. A human watching the same video sees nothing — the differences are below perceptual threshold. But they’re above the statistical threshold that a model trained on thousands of trajectories can detect.

This separates two things usually conflated: when a decision becomes detectable and when it becomes irreversible. The cell may not be committed at the 10-hour mark. But the trajectory it’s on is already distinguishable from the alternative. The fate is readable before it’s sealed.