arXiv AI

SeqMaestro: From nucleotide sequences to biological hypotheses through interpretable machine learning

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Tool-Augmented On-Policy Distillation for LLM Domain Adaptation in Sequence-Based Omics Tasks

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.

By Jie Ying, Zhefan Wang, Zihong Chen, Zhengqing Li, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li, Jian Liu, Fang Hu, Tao Luo, Zhonghang Yuan, Wanli Ouyang, Stan Z. Li, Fan Yang, Nanqing Dong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

Explainable AI for Cancer Drug Response Prediction: Beyond Univariate Feature Attributions

arXiv:2607. 00931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting cancer drug response from transcriptomic profiles is a cornerstone of precision oncology, yet the scientific value of machine learning models hinges not solely on predictive accuracy, but also on their capacity to generate reliable biological insights.

By Martino Ciaperoni, Margherita Lalli, Simone Piaggesi, Martina Varisco, Francesco Carli, Riccardo Guidotti, Dino Pedreschi, Francesco Raimondi, Fosca Giannotti
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Integrating gene regulatory priors into Transformer attention with scTransformer for interpretable scRNA-seq analysis

arXiv:2606. 09558v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivation: Transformer-based models are increasingly applied to large-scale single-cell transcriptomics, showing strong performance through self-supervised learning on millions of cells.

By Mikele Milia, Louis Fabrice Tshimanga, Henning Mueller, Manfredo Atzori, Barbara Di Camillo
arXiv AI
Oct 1

CellMSA: Context Modeling for Single-Cell Representation Learning

CellMSA introduces a novel single‑cell representation learning framework that leverages a multiple‑sequence‑alignment‑inspired context model. For each target cell, it retrieves relevant cells across batches and related cell types, summarizing cross‑cell patterns into a context‑dependent gene‑pair representation that is fed into a pair‑aware encoder. Pretraining on a massive human single‑cell corpus (≈109 million cells) and subsequent benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance gains over existing methods.

By Suyuan Zhao, Minghao Liu, Yizhen Luo, Zaiqing Nie
arXiv AI
Oct 5

SoftGene: Protein Language Model-Enhanced Soft Prompting for Interpretable Gene Set Annotation

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.

By Drew Ross, Arya Hadizadeh Moghaddam, Dongjie Wang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Zijun Yao