SoftGene is a new framework that enhances gene set annotation by combining protein language model representations with a hybrid prompting scheme. It uses a hierarchical attention-based encoder built on ESM to encode gene sets from protein amino acid sequences, then merges soft prompts derived from these embeddings with hard prompts generated by a large language model. The approach is evaluated on Gene Ontology and MSigDB datasets, showing that integrating protein-sequence information with textual context improves overall annotation performance, though the benefit varies across biological domains.
arXiv:2601. 12805v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown growing promise in biomedical research, particularly for knowledge-driven interpretation tasks.
The paper introduces a scalable method to interpret sparse autoencoder (SAE) features in the ESM-2 protein language model by leveraging geometrically inspired features of the protein α‑carbon backbone. Across 8M layers of ESM-2, a false discovery rate–controlled analysis shows that local geometry is significantly associated with many SAE features, revealing substructure within known biological labels and enabling annotation of unannotated metagenomic proteins. Ablation experiments demonstrate that removing these geometric features shifts ESM-2’s predicted contact maps toward the descriptor, linking mechanistic interpretability with structural biology.
arXiv:2602. 02320v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Molecular function is largely determined by structure.
arXiv:2608. 12090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have transferred the latest advances from natural language processing to computational biology.
Protein language models (PLMs) have transferred the latest advances from natural language processing to computational biology. These models, trained on large corpora of protein sequence data, are widely used to translate amino acid sequences into latent-space embeddings, ready for use in diverse downstream tasks (DTs).
The paper introduces OmicsBench, a new reasoning benchmark for multi‑omics sequences that includes 1,160 expert‑validated questions across DNA regulation, RNA processing, and protein function tasks, requiring traceable evidence chains. Evaluation of 17 large language models shows that scientific LLMs, while more accurate in classification, often lack valid evidence, suggesting shortcut learning. To address this, the authors propose tool‑augmented on‑policy distillation (TA‑OPD), a post‑training method that improves both evidence grounding and predictive performance across five Qwen3.5 models of varying sizes.
arXiv:2607. 08803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The push toward large language models for biology (BioLM) has created a need for training corpora that can endow models with a genuine understanding of biology.
The paper introduces MITE, a method that transforms biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) into a structure‑to‑structure generation task by encoding instructions and outputs in multiple programming languages (Python, C++, Java). This approach provides structurally diverse supervision without extra biomedical knowledge, and during inference it aggregates predictions via entity‑level voting to reduce language‑specific variance. Experiments on six BioNER datasets show that MITE outperforms BERT‑based and LLM‑based baselines and generalizes well across datasets.
arXiv:2609.37675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein Language Models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress following scaling laws established in natural language processing across sequence- and str...
arXiv:2606. 08147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DNA cis-regulatory elements (CREs) such as enhancers control gene expression levels.
arXiv:2609.14882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nucleotide sequence analysis is central to problems spanning regulatory genomics, evolutionary biology, and phenotype prediction. Classical bioinform...
arXiv:2510. 17064v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Single-cell RNA sequencing has transformed our ability to identify diverse cell types and their transcriptomic signatures.