Abstract:Explaining deep neural network predictions on genome sequences enables biological insight and hypothesis generation-often of greater interest than predictive performance alone. While explanations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to capture relevant patterns in genome sequences, it is unclear whether this transfers to more expressive Transformer-based genome language models (gLMs). To answer this question, we adapt AttnLRP, an extension of layer-wise relevance propagation to the attention mechanism, and apply it to the state-of-the-art gLM DNABERT-2. Thereby, we propose strategies to transfer explanations from token and nucleotide level. We evaluate the adaption of AttnLRP on genomic datasets using multiple metrics. Further, we provide an extensive comparison between the explanations of DNABERT-2 and a baseline CNN. Our results demonstrate that AttnLRP yields reliable explanations corresponding to known biological patterns. Hence, like CNNs, gLMs can also help derive biological insights. This work contributes to the explainability of gLMs and addresses the comparability of relevance attributions across different architectures.
| Comments: | Accepted at the 4th World Conference on Explainable Artificial Intelligence, XAI-2026 |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2604.21690 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2604.21690v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.21690 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
From: Paulo Yanez Sarmiento [view email]
[v1]
Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:56:55 UTC (511 KB)
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