seqLens

This repository contains the code for the seqLens manuscript. In the seqLens project, we investigated genomics language models by implementing a set of DNA language models and benchmarked their efficiency.
Hugging Face models: omicseye/seqLens

seqLens manuscript: https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag139

Overview

Our research introduces several key innovations in DNA sequence modeling. We gathered two different pre-training datasets consisting of:

• 19,551 reference genomes with over 18,000 prokaryote genomes (over 115B nucleotides)
• A more balanced dataset composed of 1,355 prokaryote and eukaryote reference genomes (over 180B nucleotides)

We trained five different byte-pair encoding tokenizers and pre-trained 52 DNA language models. We introduce seqLens models, which are based on disentangled attention with relative positional encoding, and they outperform state-of-the-art models in 13 out of 19 benchmarking tasks.

Additionally, we explored:

• Domain-specific pre-training
• Token representation strategies
• Fine-tuning methods

Our findings show that:

• Using relevant pre-training data significantly boosts performance
• Alternative pooling techniques can enhance classification
• There is a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy between full and parameter-efficient fine-tuning

These insights provide a foundation for optimizing model design and training in biological research.

Features

In this repository, we include code for the following tasks:

• Pre-training
• Benchmarking
• Visualization
• Different pooling techniques for classification
• Vector representations for DNA sequences

Benchmarking Results

The following visualization shows how fine-tuning methods affect the performance of the models in vector representations:

Usage

You can use these models for your research or use the provided scripts to train your models.

# Load model directly
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForMaskedLM

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("omicseye/seqLens_4096_512_89M-at-base")
model = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained("omicseye/seqLens_4096_512_89M-at-base")

🔧 Training & Compute Summary

All seqLens models were trained on NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs using distributed training via HuggingFace Accelerate.

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📊 Representative Training Configurations

Model	Params	Vocab	Context	# GPUs	Batch / GPU	Effective Batch	Runtime (h)	GPU-hours	Avg TFLOPs
seqLens_4096_512_15M	15M	4096	512	2	128	256	43.97	87.9	15.56
seqLens_4096_512_47M-at	47M	4096	512	2	64	128	50.11	100.2	13.76
seqLens_4096_512_89M-at-base	89M	4096	512	4	16	64	167.98	671.9	5.55
seqLens_4096_512_89M-at-base-multi	89M	4096	512	1	64	64	507.61	507.6	6.02

GPU-hours = runtime × number of GPUs

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🖥 Hardware Utilization Distribution

# GPUs Used	Number of Runs	Typical Models
1 GPU	1 run	89M-at-base-multi
2 GPUs	Majority of runs	15M, 23M, 46M, 47M
4 GPUs	Several runs	23M-at-xsmall, 47M-at-small, 89M-at-base

🔍 Observations

• Most experiments were conducted using 2× V100 GPUs
• Larger models (≥ 89M parameters) benefit from 4 GPUs
• Single-GPU training is feasible but increases wall-clock time
• TFLOPs decrease for larger models due to memory and communication overhead

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⚙️ Training Characteristics

• Context length: 512 tokens (~2.8–3kb DNA sequence context)
• Vocabulary size: 4096 (BPE tokenizer)
• Mixed precision enabled
• Gradient checkpointing enabled for larger models
• Typical training schedule: up to 150K steps
• Runtime and TFLOPs logged per iteration

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💡 Reproducibility Guidance

Model Size	Recommended Hardware	Expected Runtime
15M–47M	2× V100 GPUs	~40–60 hours
89M	4× V100 GPUs	~160–170 hours
89M (single GPU)	1× V100 GPU	~500 hours

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📦 Environment

• GPU: NVIDIA Tesla V100
• Framework: PyTorch
• Distributed Training: HuggingFace Accelerate
• Logging: TFLOPs, runtime, and iteration time tracked per step

Citation

If you use seqLens in your research, please cite our work:

@article{Baghbanzadeh2026,
  title = {seqLens: Optimizing Language Models for Genomic Predictions},
  volume = {43},
  ISSN = {1537-1719},
  url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag139},
  DOI = {10.1093/molbev/msag139},
  number = {7},
  journal = {Molecular Biology and Evolution},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press (OUP)},
  author = {Baghbanzadeh,  Mahdi and Mann,  Brendan T and Crandall,  Keith A and Rahnavard,  Ali},
  editor = {Tamura,  Koichiro},
  year = {2026},
  month = June 
}

License

This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.
Commercial use of this software or any related models may require a separate licensing agreement due to a pending patent.
For commercial inquiries, please contact Ali Rahnavard at rahnavard@gwu.edu.

Contact

For any questions, feel free to email or open an issue in this repository.