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arXiv · 2605.06728

OmicsLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Multi-Sample Omics Reasoning

Abstract

Interpreting transcriptomic data is one of the most common analytical tasks in modern biology. Yet most current models either consume expression profiles without producing natural-language biological explanations, or reason in language without direct access to quantitative omics measurements. We introduce OmicsLM, a multimodal LLM that connects quantitative omics profiles with natural-language biological tasks. OmicsLM represents each transcriptomic profile as a compact continuous representation within the LLM context. This interface preserves quantitative expression signal while allowing natural-language instructions, explicit gene mentions, and multiple interleaved biological samples to be processed together in one model context. We train OmicsLM on more than 5.5 million instruction-following examples spanning over 70 task types, combining continuous transcriptomic inputs, experimental data rendered through diverse language templates, and free-text biological knowledge and question-answering data. This mixture covers cell type annotation, perturbation prediction, clinical prediction, pathway reasoning, and open-ended biological question answering. Existing benchmarks evaluate either profile-level prediction or text-only biological QA, leaving language-guided, multi-sample reasoning over real expression profiles unmeasured. To close this gap, we introduce GEO-OmicsQA, a benchmark for multi-sample biological question answering built from real Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) studies. We demonstrate that OmicsLM can use expression profiles directly and perform comparably to specialized omics models on profile-level tasks, while outperforming both omics-specialized models and general LLMs on language-guided biological reasoning over expression data.

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BibTeXRIS

Maciej Sypetkowski, Joanna Krawczyk, Łukasz Smoliński, Remigiusz Kinas, Przemysław Pietrzak, Tomasz Jetka, Rafał Powalski. 2026-05-07. OmicsLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Multi-Sample Omics Reasoning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06728

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