arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

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.

By Yanjun Shao, Yundi Chen, Yashvi Patel, Aurelien Pelissier, Mar\'ia Rodr\'iguez Mart\'inez
arXiv AI
2d ago

CellMSA: Context Modeling for Single-Cell Representation Learning

CellMSA introduces a novel single‑cell representation learning framework that leverages a multiple‑sequence‑alignment‑inspired context model. For each target cell, it retrieves relevant cells across batches and related cell types, summarizing cross‑cell patterns into a context‑dependent gene‑pair representation that is fed into a pair‑aware encoder. Pretraining on a massive human single‑cell corpus (≈109 million cells) and subsequent benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance gains over existing methods.

By Suyuan Zhao, Minghao Liu, Yizhen Luo, Zaiqing Nie
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Monroe: A Molecular Foundation Model for In-Context Probabilistic Inference

Monroe is a new molecular foundation model that improves upon existing models by pre‑training on over 81 million molecules from the PM6 quantum chemistry dataset, enhancing stereochemistry representation, and introducing novel training losses such as conformer denoising and embedding decorrelation. It also incorporates a prior‑data‑fitted model (TabPFN) for downstream in‑context prediction and demonstrates superior performance on Polaris benchmarks and activity cliff tests. Ablation studies show that the PFN‑based downstream approach can upgrade other models, producing state‑of‑the‑art variants MiniMol_PFN and CheMeleon_PFN.

By Blazej Banaszewski, Andrew W. Fitzgibbon
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Tool-Augmented On-Policy Distillation for LLM Domain Adaptation in Sequence-Based Omics Tasks

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