Athan Zhaohong Li

A taxonomy-informed sparse DNA foundation model for microbial genomics. MicroGlot is a 23-layer decoder-only mixture-of-experts transformer pretrained on 378.3 billion nucleotides from 3.70 million sequences across 99,700 microbial species, spanning bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists, viruses and plasmids. It encodes the taxonomic hierarchy as hyperbolic (Poincaré) embeddings and uses them both as an input token and to steer expert routing. Paper: A Taxonomy-Informed Sparse DNA Foundation Model for Microbial Genomics\ A species is known if it is one of the 99,700 pretraining species (check with tokenizer.hasspecies(name)). For taxonomic classification tasks, use MicroGlot-plain, as…