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.
arXiv:2606. 16517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific reasoning models for biology combine language models with foundation models trained on multimodal biological data, including DNA, RNA, and proteins.
Scientific reasoning models for biology combine language models with foundation models trained on multimodal biological data, including DNA, RNA, and proteins. These models are built through post-training, yet how each stage shapes reasoning and generalization remains poorly understood.
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:2606. 08147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DNA cis-regulatory elements (CREs) such as enhancers control gene expression levels.
arXiv:2606. 01042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perturbation experiments are central to understanding cellular mechanisms, but remain costly and sparse, motivating prediction of gene expression responses for unobserved conditions.
arXiv:2510. 17532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting cancer treatment outcomes requires models that are both accurate and interpretable, particularly in the presence of heterogeneous clinical data.
The paper introduces HypoKG, a unified biochemical knowledge graph built from KEGG, Rhea, and UniProt, and uses it to benchmark 13,200 biomedical hypotheses generated by six large language models (LLMs). By varying the biological information provided—source enzyme only, full biological path, or source and disease endpoint—the study finds that LLMs produce higher-scoring hypotheses when given minimal information, but these are less evidence‑grounded. When supplied with the full biological path, the models generate hypotheses that align more closely with known mechanistic relationships, a phenomenon the authors term evidence‑disciplined reasoning, which is confirmed by shuffling intermediate path steps. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowledge graphs can both uncover novel disease–enzyme pairs and guide LLMs to reason more accurately from evidence, improving the reliability of AI‑generated biomedical hypotheses."
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.
arXiv:2607. 18777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating machine learning in scientific domains requires separating correct predictions from correct reasons under realistic distribution shifts.
OmniVCBench is a figure‑centric, source‑traceable benchmark designed to evaluate the interpretation component of Artificial Intelligence Virtual Cells (AIVCs). It comprises 6,077 curated question–answer pairs drawn from scientific figures and experimental contexts, organized into three scientific reasoning tasks that mirror the AIVC Predict–Explain–Discover agenda. The benchmark also introduces AIVC‑Judge, a task‑conditioned MLLM‑as‑a‑judge framework with reference‑aware rubrics, and a Model‑Derived Hard‑Negative Mining strategy to generate multiple‑choice distractors for efficient evaluation.
arXiv:2605. 16331v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Protein language models are increasingly used to guide experimental and clinical decisions, yet it is often unclear whether a confident prediction reflects recognition of biological evidence or retrieval of a statistical default.
arXiv:2606. 18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation.