Entropy, Disagreement, and the Limits of Foundation Models in Genomics
arXiv:2604. 04287v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models in genomics have shown mixed success compared to their counterparts in natural language processing.
VANDAM is a framework that augments Genomic Foundation Models by incorporating DNA molecular priors into self‑supervised training. It predicts regional molecular properties from pooled representations and, when functional labels are available, injects local features at the input. The approach consistently improves downstream performance across multiple architecture families and genomic tasks, and probing experiments show that the priors generalize to unseen molecular properties.
arXiv:2604. 04287v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models in genomics have shown mixed success compared to their counterparts in natural language processing.
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".
The paper proposes a three‑stage training pipeline that begins with procedural pretraining on abstract, procedurally generated data, followed by molecular pretraining on SMILES, and finally downstream fine‑tuning for molecular property prediction. Experiments show that procedural pretraining improves downstream performance—e.g., a 4.8% error reduction on Lipophilicity—especially when labeled data are scarce, and that the benefit peaks at an intermediate procedural training budget. Analysis indicates that transferable knowledge resides mainly in attention layers, while feed‑forward layers may over‑specialize.
arXiv:2603. 25062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive molecular models assign probability to molecular serializations even though chemical identity is invariant to serialization.
arXiv:2510. 14217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The spectral properties of feature embeddings offer critical insights into model generalization and representation quality.
WEECFP-SuRGE introduces a position‑aware substructure encoding method that combines tokenized hierarchical Morgan fingerprints with graph‑distance‑dependent rotations applied at the input and within transformer self‑attention. The approach captures local chemistry, long‑range interactions, and molecular topology without requiring external pretraining or 3‑D conformer generation. Benchmarks on MoleculeNet and the Therapeutic Data Commons ADMET datasets show competitive performance, and a reconstruction procedure correctly identifies constitutional isomers for 92.6% of a 4,200‑molecule library.
arXiv:2606. 11057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite its importance to applications in protein design, predicting protein properties like binding affinity and thermostability from sparse experimental data remains a significant challenge.
The paper investigates how explicitly supervising molecular embeddings with a molecule’s Bemis‑Murcko scaffold influences representation learning. Experiments compare Euclidean and Lorentz contrastive objectives under two augmentation strengths, showing that scaffold‑supervised models consistently group molecules by identical and related scaffolds. These embeddings also enhance property prediction on several tasks, though the magnitude of improvement varies with the target property and the geometry used.
The study evaluates four pretrained molecular language models on six virtual libraries covering drug discovery, organic materials, and catalysis. It finds that native embeddings vary widely in performance, while molecular fingerprints remain consistently strong. Fine‑tuning the models on library‑specific data markedly improves sample efficiency, with several adapted encoders outperforming others across all tasks.
arXiv:2606. 11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited.
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.
arXiv:2603. 24025v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unsupervised learning of high-dimensional data is challenging due to irrelevant or noisy features obscuring underlying structures.