Lyra: An Efficient and Expressive Subquadratic Architecture for Modeling Biological Sequences

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ramesh, Krithik, Siddiqui, Sameed M., Gu, Albert, Mitzenmacher, Michael D., Sabeti, Pardis C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ramesh, Krithik
Siddiqui, Sameed M.
Gu, Albert
Mitzenmacher, Michael D.
Sabeti, Pardis C.
author_facet Ramesh, Krithik
Siddiqui, Sameed M.
Gu, Albert
Mitzenmacher, Michael D.
Sabeti, Pardis C.
contents Deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks and Transformers have revolutionized biological sequence modeling, with recent advances driven by scaling up foundation and task-specific models. The computational resources and large datasets required, however, limit their applicability in biological contexts. We introduce Lyra, a subquadratic architecture for sequence modeling, grounded in the biological framework of epistasis for understanding sequence-to-function relationships. Mathematically, we demonstrate that state space models efficiently capture global epistatic interactions and combine them with projected gated convolutions for modeling local relationships. We demonstrate that Lyra is performant across over 100 wide-ranging biological tasks, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in many key areas, including protein fitness landscape prediction, biophysical property prediction (e.g. disordered protein region functions) peptide engineering applications (e.g. antibody binding, cell-penetrating peptide prediction), RNA structure analysis, RNA function prediction, and CRISPR guide design. It achieves this with orders-of-magnitude improvements in inference speed and reduction in parameters (up to 120,000-fold in our tests) compared to recent biology foundation models. Using Lyra, we were able to train and run every task in this study on two or fewer GPUs in under two hours, democratizing access to biological sequence modeling at SOTA performance, with potential applications to many fields.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16351
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lyra: An Efficient and Expressive Subquadratic Architecture for Modeling Biological Sequences
Ramesh, Krithik
Siddiqui, Sameed M.
Gu, Albert
Mitzenmacher, Michael D.
Sabeti, Pardis C.
Machine Learning
Genomics
Deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks and Transformers have revolutionized biological sequence modeling, with recent advances driven by scaling up foundation and task-specific models. The computational resources and large datasets required, however, limit their applicability in biological contexts. We introduce Lyra, a subquadratic architecture for sequence modeling, grounded in the biological framework of epistasis for understanding sequence-to-function relationships. Mathematically, we demonstrate that state space models efficiently capture global epistatic interactions and combine them with projected gated convolutions for modeling local relationships. We demonstrate that Lyra is performant across over 100 wide-ranging biological tasks, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in many key areas, including protein fitness landscape prediction, biophysical property prediction (e.g. disordered protein region functions) peptide engineering applications (e.g. antibody binding, cell-penetrating peptide prediction), RNA structure analysis, RNA function prediction, and CRISPR guide design. It achieves this with orders-of-magnitude improvements in inference speed and reduction in parameters (up to 120,000-fold in our tests) compared to recent biology foundation models. Using Lyra, we were able to train and run every task in this study on two or fewer GPUs in under two hours, democratizing access to biological sequence modeling at SOTA performance, with potential applications to many fields.
title Lyra: An Efficient and Expressive Subquadratic Architecture for Modeling Biological Sequences
topic Machine Learning
Genomics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16351