Thalamus‑Reasoning is a 9B multimodal large language model that embeds bulk or single‑cell transcriptomes as continuous vectors, allowing them to be interleaved with natural‑language instructions and other samples. The model is trained on a large corpus that links experimental measurements to biological knowledge and task supervision, covering 157 task groups and 5.21 million conversations. It outperforms competing models on several held‑out annotation tasks, the GEO‑OmicsQA benchmark, and PerturbQA perturbation‑response prediction, demonstrating the benefit of continuous omics representations over text‑only gene lists.
By Maciej Sypetkowski, {\L}ukasz Smoli\'nski, Remigiusz Kinas, Joanna Krawczyk, Bart{\l}omiej Hofman, Aleksandra Mo\.zwi{\l}{\l}o, Micha{\l} Pikusa, Tomasz Jetka, Rafa{\l} Powalski
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: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.
By Hyunjin Seo, Hyeon Hwang, Gyubok Lee, Jay Shin, Jimin Park, Taesoo Kim, Sanghoon Lee, Hongjoon Ahn, Sungjun Han, Sangwon Jung
The study evaluates whether biological reasoning models actually use their biological inputs by testing six models on DNA, protein, and single‑cell tasks. By perturbing one biological input while keeping others fixed, the authors find that many models (e.g., Evo2, ESM3, BioReason, BioReason‑Pro) rely primarily on textual information, with minimal impact from the biological representations. In contrast, models like ChatNT, Prot2Text‑V2, CellWhisperer, and Cell2Sentence‑Scale show greater dependence on their biological inputs, yet overall accuracy gains do not consistently reflect increased biological input contribution.
By Ada Fang, Nikitha Thoduguli, Lukas Fesser, Hanlin Zhang, Sham M. Kakade, Marinka Zitnik
arXiv:2507. 19634v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have laid the foundation for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), which unify text, speech, and vision within a single framework.
By Sara Papi, Maike Z\"ufle, Marco Gaido, Beatrice Savoldi, Danni Liu, Ioannis Douros, Luisa Bentivogli, Jan Niehues
arXiv:2605.07938v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Single-cell representation learning (SCRL) from gene expression data offers a way to uncover the complex regulatory logic underlying cellular funct...
By Sachini Weerasekara, Natasha Darras, Sagar Kamarthi, Colles Price, Jacqueline Isaacs
arXiv:2511.21075v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Engineering LLMs to accelerate life sciences research requires a robust alignment with biomedical knowledge. We observe that biomedical text...
By Zhenchao Tang, Fang Wang, Haohuai He, Jiale Zhou, Tianxu Lv, Jun Zhu, Shouzhi Chen, Minghao Yang, Yu Wang, Jiayang Wu, Yidong Song, Yaokun Li, Jiehui Huang, Jun Zhou, Bing He, Jianhua Yao
arXiv:2607. 25947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Question answering (QA) over irregular clinical time series (ICTS) plays a pivotal role in a wide range of healthcare applications.
By Frank Nie, Ethan B Liu, Yuan Zhu, Wei Fan, Jindong Han
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.
By Songtao Li, Yijia Zhang, Jianyuan Yuan, Shidi Zhang, Fengyu Zhang, Hongfei Lin
arXiv:2606. 08147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DNA cis-regulatory elements (CREs) such as enhancers control gene expression levels.
By Yi Duan, Zhao Yang, Jiwei Zhu, Ying Ba, Chuan Cao, Bing Su
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.
By Xiaohan Huang, Meng Xiao, Chuan Qin, Qingqing Long, Jinmiao Chen, Yuanchun Zhou, Hengshu Zhu
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