arXiv AI

What DNA Foundation Models Learn Beyond Sequence Composition

arXiv AI
Aug 12

JEPA-DNA: Grounding Genomic Foundation Models through Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures

arXiv:2602. 17162v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Genomic Foundation Models (GFMs) typically rely on Masked Language Modeling (MLM) or Next-Token Prediction (NTP) to learn the "Laws of Nature".

By Ariel Larey, Elay Dahan, Amit Bleiweiss, Raizy Kellerman, Guy Leib, Omri Nayshool, Dan Ofer, Tal Zinger, Dan Dominissini, Gideon Rechavi, Nicole Bussola, Simon Lee, Shane O'Connell, Dung Hoang, Marissa Wirth, Alexander W. Charney, Nati Daniel, Yoli Shavit
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Causal dictionary learning reveals and validates transcription-factor binding features in genomic language models

arXiv:2607. 19618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Genomic language models achieve strong performance across regulatory-genomics tasks, yet what these models internally represent remains opaque, and the field lacks a principled procedure for verifying that an apparent ``concept'' inside a model is real rather than an artifact of sequence composition.

By Sarwan Ali
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

When do cheap embeddings beat protein language models? A theoretically-grounded hashing sketch for biological sequence classification

The paper introduces Murmur2Vec, a lightweight, alignment‑free embedding that uses k‑mer counts hashed with MurmurHash to create a compact representation for biological sequences. It provides a full theoretical analysis, including bias/variance formulas, a Johnson–Lindenstrauss‑style concentration bound, and an excess‑risk bound that clarifies the trade‑off between hash‑table size and classifier performance. Empirically, Murmur2Vec matches or surpasses a fine‑tuned 650M‑parameter ESM‑2 protein language model across several classification tasks, including SARS‑CoV‑2 spike lineage and HIV‑1 Env subtype identification.

By Sarwan Ali, Taslim Murad, Imdadullah Khan, Safi Faizullah
arXiv AI
Sep 15

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

arXiv:2609.14882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nucleotide sequence analysis is central to problems spanning regulatory genomics, evolutionary biology, and phenotype prediction. Classical bioinform...

By Evgeny S. Saveliev, Krzysztof Kacprzyk, Charlotte Capitanchik, Neelanjan Mukherjee, Kate Matlin, Ryan Sheridan, Srinivas Ramachandran, Jernej Ule, David L. Bentley, Mihaela van der Schaar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Vertical Fusion: Condensing Internal Representations for Robust ViT Classification

arXiv:2607. 10391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite exposing rich intermediate representations, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are almost exclusively utilized as black-box feature extractors, where only the last layer is considered for downstream tasks.

By Francesco Di Salvo, Shyam Nandan Rai, Hamed Damirchi, Ignacio Meza De la Jara, Sebastian Doerrich, Marco Lents, Christian Ledig
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Omega-N: Interpretable Structural Node Descriptors and Their Applicability Domain

The paper introduces Omega‑N, a set of ten interpretable node‑level structural descriptors derived from localizing four factors of a composite structural index. By correcting the ill‑conditioned localization with a configuration‑null excess and a multi‑scale personalized‑PageRank neighbourhood, Omega‑N achieves competitive or superior performance in six in‑domain node‑classification tasks compared to a recursive feature engine that uses up to 252 features. In drug‑target prioritisation on protein interaction networks, Omega‑N improves AUPRC by 0.073 to 0.144 over a centrality baseline and remains robust across independent datasets and bias controls, though it offers no benefit when combined with Node2Vec. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a compact, interpretable set of structural features can match or exceed more complex feature sets in practical graph‑based prediction tasks, particularly in biomedical network analysis."

By Alberto Acedo
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Beyond Predictive Accuracy: A Reliability-Aware Audit of Molecular Representations for Human Olfaction

arXiv:2607. 24848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained molecular encoders are commonly evaluated through downstream prediction, but predictive accuracy alone does not establish that a learned representation captures reproducible scientific structure, adds information beyond strong conventional baselines, or transfers out of distribution.

By Kai Lun Huang (California State University, Fullerton), Wei Chieh Sun (University of Washington)