Predicting evolutionary rate as a pretraining task improves genome language model representations
Micaela Elisa Consens, Kevin K. Yang, Jimmy Hall, Ashley Mae Conard, Bo Wang, Lorin A. Crawford, Alan M Moses, Alex Xijie Lu
This paper introduces a pretraining task for genome language models that predicts evolutionary rate, showing improved performance over sequence-only pretraining.
bioRxiv · Feb 4, 2026 · PreprintGenomics