Cited by 120SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 ResearchGenomics and Phylogenetic StudiesMachine Learning in Bioinformatics

GenSLMs: Genome-scale language models reveal SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary dynamics

Open access
Zvyagin, Maxim, Brace, Alexander, Hippe, Kyle, Deng, Yuntian, Zhang, Bin, Bohorquez, Cindy Orozco, Clyde, Austin, Kale, Bharat +28 more·2023·The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications

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Abstract

We seek to transform how new and emergent variants of pandemic-causing viruses, specifically SARS-CoV-2, are identified and classified. By adapting large language models (LLMs) for genomic data, we build genome-scale language models (GenSLMs) which can learn the evolutionary landscape of SARS-CoV-2 genomes. By pre-training on over 110 million prokaryotic gene sequences and fine-tuning a SARS-CoV-2-specific model on 1.5 million genomes, we show that GenSLMs can accurately and rapidly identify variants of concern. Thus, to our knowledge, GenSLMs represents one of the first whole-genome scale foundation models which can generalize to other prediction tasks. We demonstrate scaling of GenSLMs on GPU-based supercomputers and AI-hardware accelerators utilizing 1.63 Zettaflops in training runs with a sustained performance of 121 PFLOPS in mixed precision and peak of 850 PFLOPS. We present initial scientific insights from examining GenSLMs in tracking evolutionary dynamics of SARS-CoV-2, paving the path to realizing this on large biological data.

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Crossref · 10.1177/10943420231201154

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  • Existing DNA language models are limited by dense Transformer architectures, incur high computational cost that scales quadratically with sequence length, and generally underperform at single-nucleotide or byte-level resolution compared with models trained at coarser resolutions.

    “existing attempts to model DNA as a language (15–17) are limited by the prevailing dense Transformer architecture, which incurs high computational cost as input sequence lengths grow relative to model width (scaling quadratically) and generally underperforms at single-nucleotide or byte-level resolution compared with models trained at coarser resolutions (18).”

    From Sequence modeling and design from molecular to genome scale with Evo (2024) · cites this paper as [15]

    Split into 2 atoms — 0 confirmed, 1 partially supported, 0 disputed, 0 misattributed, 1 unverifiable. Expand the claim to see per-atom verdicts.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Transformer-based DNA models are constrained to short context lengths and use token aggregation schemes, sacrificing single-nucleotide resolution.

    “As a result, Transformer-based DNA models are constrained to short context lengths and use schemes that aggregate nucleotides into the basic units of language models, called tokens, thereby sacrificing single-nucleotide resolution (15, 16, 21–23).”

    From Sequence modeling and design from molecular to genome scale with Evo (2024) · cites this paper as [15]

    Section 4.2 contrasts standard 1,024- or 2,048-token contexts with the longer sequences needed for genomes, and Section 5.2.1 says GenSLM groups three nucleotides into each codon-level input token. But the paper does not say this sacrifices the ability to model individual nucleotide changes; Section 5.2.1 says GenSLM models individual mutations at nucleotide scale. The claim therefore overstates the resolution consequence and treats a common context-length challenge as a constraint on Transformer-based DNA models generally. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • On prokaryotic protein DMS datasets, Evo's zero-shot performance exceeded all other tested nucleotide models, including GenSLM.

    “On DMS datasets of prokaryotic proteins, Evo’s zero-shot performance exceeded all other nucleotide models tested (Fig. 2B and table S4), including GenSLM (15)”

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Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Yadu Babuji, Anna Woodard, Zhuozhao Li, Ben Clifford, Rohan Kumar, Lukasz Lacinski, Ryan Chard, Justin Wozniak, Ian Foster, Michael Wilde, Daniel Katz, and Kyle Chard. 2019. Parsl: Pervasive Parallel Programming in Python. In ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing.
  2. Jacob Devlin Ming-Wei Chang Kenton and Lee Kristina Toutanova. 2019. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT. 4171-4186.
  3. Philipp Moritz, Robert Nishihara, Stephanie Wang, Alexey Tumanov, Richard Liaw, Eric Liang, Melih Elibol, Zongheng Yang, William Paul, Michael I. Jordan, and Ion Stoica. 2018. Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications. In 13th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 18). USENIX Association, Carlsbad, CA, 561-577. https://www.usenix.org/conference/ osdi18/presentation/moritz
  4. Samyam Rajbhandari, Jeff Rasley, Olatunji Ruwase, and Yuxiong He. 2020. Zero: Mem- ory optimizations toward training trillion parameter models. In SC20: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. IEEE, 1-16.
  5. Rose E Wang, Esin Durmus, Noah Goodman, and Tatsunori Hashimoto. 2022. Lan- guage modeling via stochastic processes. In International Conference on Learning Representations.

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Authors
Zvyagin, M., Brace, A., Hippe, K., Deng, Y., Zhang, B., Bohorquez, C. O., Clyde, A., Kale, B., Perez-Rivera, D., Ma, H., Mann, C. M., Irvin, M., Ozgulbas, D. G., Vassilieva, N., Pauloski, J. G., Ward, L., Hayot-Sasson, V., Emani, M., Foreman, S., Xie, Z., Lin, D., Shukla, M., Nie, W., Romero, J., Dallago, C., Vahdat, A., Xiao, C., Gibbs, T., Foster, I., Davis, J. J., Papka, M. E., Brettin, T., Stevens, R., Anandkumar, A., Vishwanath, V., & Ramanathan, A.
Affiliations
  • Argonne National Laboratory (US)
  • Harvard University (US)
  • Cerebras Systems (United States) (US)
  • Northern Illinois University (US)
  • Department of Biochemistry, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA
  • University of Chicago (US)
  • Data Science and Learning Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, USA
  • Nvidia (United States) (US)
  • NVIDIA Inc., Santa Clara, CA, USA
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
Corresponding author
  • Vishwanath, Venkatram
  • Ramanathan, Arvind
Venue
The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications
Published
2023-10-27
Volume
37
Issue
6
Pages
683-705
ISSN
  • 0890-2720 (ISSN-L)
  • 1094-3420
  • 1741-2846
OpenAlex
W4387994442
Cited by
120
References
57
Citations by year
2026: 30 · 2025: 40 · 2024: 35 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 1
FWCI
24.63
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (publishedVersion)
  • bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • Espace ÉTS (ETS) (submittedVersion)
Funders
Exascale Computing Project
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Infectious Diseases › SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
Keywords
SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 variants of concern, variant identification, viral evolution, foundation models, mixed-precision training

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