arXiv AI By Sarwan Ali

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

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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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

Structure is not mechanism: high-gain gated-FFN rows across text and genomic foundation models

The study investigates whether unusually high‑gain parameters in transformer models—specifically gated feed‑forward network (gated‑FFN) rows—play a critical functional role across both text and genomic foundation models. By computing exact bilinear weight operators and testing structural extremeness, the authors find that high‑gain rows are enriched for functional importance but do not reliably predict causal effect size or severity. The analysis reveals model‑specific causal organizations, including super‑additive interactions in DNABERT‑2 and position‑localized dependencies in GENERator, indicating that structural prominence signals enrichment rather than calibrated criticality.

By Alexandros Tzanakakis, Aris Karatzikos, Ilias Georgakopoulos-Soares
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Generative modeling of intrinsically disordered protein regions by reinforcing sparse autoencoder features

The paper introduces IDiom, an autoregressive protein language model trained on a large dataset of intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDRs) from AlphaFold, and demonstrates that it can generate sequences matching natural IDR composition, motifs, and disorder. It further presents RL‑SAE, a reinforcement learning approach that uses sparse autoencoder features to steer generation toward specific functional patterns, achieving high activation of targeted features and improved predicted subcellular localization and transcriptional activity. The combination of IDiom and RL‑SAE allows interpretable, composable IDR design by explicitly controlling function‑associated sequence features.

By Jason X. Liu, Sebastian Ibarraran, Frank Hu, Soojung Yang, Xinyu A. Feng, Abigail Park, Anagha Aneesh, Lacramioara Bintu, Alexander R. Dunn, Grant M. Rotskoff
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

UNMASK: Discovering and Causally Verifying Spurious Shortcuts in Text Classifiers

Neural language models trained on large crowdsourced corpora frequently exploit spurious surface patterns tied to target labels without true linguistic or causal relevance, boosting benchmark performance while failing on adversarial or out-of-distribution inputs. Existing approaches either require manual specification of the feature vocabulary or automate discovery only partially, leaving the gap between dataset-level correlation and model-level exploitation unaddressed.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

UNMASK: Discovering and Causally Verifying Spurious Shortcuts in Text Classifiers

arXiv:2608. 09209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural language models trained on large crowdsourced corpora frequently exploit spurious surface patterns tied to target labels without true linguistic or causal relevance, boosting benchmark performance while failing on adversarial or out-of-distribution inputs.

By Chidaksh Ravuru, Shashank Srivastava