用进化信息优化DNA分词,让模型更懂生物功能序列。
EvoLen: Evolution-Guided Tokenization for DNA Language Model
- 基于跨物种进化信号分组DNA,分组训练并合并词表。
- 在多个基准上提升功能片段保留率,优于传统BPE。
- 适合基因组功能分析、生物序列建模的研究者使用。
DNA语言模型中的分词是基础表示单元,但其设计仍缺乏深入探索。与自然语言不同,DNA无天然分词边界或预设组合规则,分词需作为关键建模决策。现有方法如字节对编码(BPE)擅长捕捉人类语言规律,但不适用于由生物功能和进化约束主导的DNA序列。本文提出EvoLen,将进化信息融入分词过程:利用跨物种进化信号对DNA序列进行分组,在各组上分别训练BPE分词器,通过优先保留保守模式的规则合并词表,并采用长度感知解码与动态规划生成分词结果。控制实验表明,EvoLen显著提升功能序列模式的保留度、基因组上下文区分能力及与进化约束的一致性,在多个DNALM基准上达到或超越标准BPE表现。结果证明分词引入了关键归纳偏置,融合进化信息可获得更生物学合理且可解释的序列表示。代码、预训练与微调检查点、分词器文件见GitHub与HuggingFace。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Tokens serve as the basic units of representation in DNA language models (DNALMs), yet their design remains underexplored. Unlike natural language, DNA lacks inherent token boundaries or predefined compositional rules, making tokenization a fundamental modeling decision rather than a naturally specified one. While existing approaches like byte-pair encoding (BPE) excel at capturing token structures that reflect human-generated linguistic regularities, DNA is organized by biological function and evolutionary constraint rather than linguistic convention. We argue that DNA tokenization should prioritize functional sequence patterns like regulatory motifs-short, recurring segments under evolutionary constraint and typically preserved across species. We incorporate evolutionary information directly into the tokenization process through EvoLen, a tokenizer that combines evolutionary stratification with length-aware decoding to better preserve motif-scale functional sequence units. EvoLen uses cross-species evolutionary signals to group DNA sequences, trains separate BPE tokenizers on each group, merges the resulting vocabularies via a rule prioritizing preserved patterns, and applies length-aware decoding with dynamic programming. Through controlled experiments, EvoLen improves the preservation of functional sequence patterns, differentiation across genomic contexts, and alignment with evolutionary constraint, while matching or outperforming standard BPE across diverse DNALM benchmarks. These results demonstrate that tokenization introduces a critical inductive bias and that incorporating evolutionary information yields more biologically meaningful and interpretable sequence representations. Code, pretrained and fine-tuned checkpoints, and tokenizer files are available at https://github.com/HN020719/EvoLen and https://huggingface.co/EvoLenTokenizer.
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