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