We present BioLangFusion, a simple approach for integrating pre-trained DNA, mRNA, and protein language models into unified molecular representations. Motivated by the central dogma of molecular biology (information flow from gene to transcript to protein), we align per-modality embeddings at the biologically meaningful codon level (three nucleotides encoding one amino acid) to ensure direct cross-modal correspondence. BioLangFusion studies three standard fusion techniques: (i) codon-level embedding concatenation, (ii) entropy-regularized attention pooling inspired by multiple-instance learning, and (iii) cross-modal multi-head attention -- each technique providing a different inductive bias for combining modality-specific signals. These methods require no additional pre-training or modification of the base models, allowing straightforward integration with existing sequence-based foundation models. Across five molecular property prediction tasks, BioLangFusion outperforms strong unimodal baselines, showing that even simple fusion of pre-trained models can capture complementary multi-omic information with minimal overhead.
@article{arxiv.2506.08936,
title = {BioLangFusion: Multimodal Fusion of DNA, mRNA, and Protein Language Models},
author = {Amina Mollaysa and Artem Moskale and Pushpak Pati and Tommaso Mansi and Mangal Prakash and Rui Liao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08936},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Proceedings of ICML 2025 Workshop on Multi-modal Foundation Proceedings of ICML 2025 Workshop on Multi-modal Foundation Proceedings of ICML 2025 Workshop on Multi-modal Foundation Models and Large Language Models for Life Sciences