BioReason: Incentivizing Multimodal Biological Reasoning within a DNA-LLM Model

Unlocking deep, interpretable biological reasoning from complex genomic data is a major AI challenge hindering scientific discovery. Current DNA foundation models, despite strong sequence representation, struggle with multi-step reasoning and lack inherent transparent, biologically intuitive explanations. We introduce BioReason, a pioneering architecture that, for the first time, deeply integrates a DNA foundation model with a Large Language Model (LLM). This novel connection enables the LLM to directly process and reason with genomic information as a fundamental input, fostering a new form of multimodal biological understanding. BioReason's sophisticated multi-step reasoning is developed through supervised fine-tuning and targeted reinforcement learning, guiding the system to generate logical, biologically coherent deductions. On biological reasoning benchmarks including KEGG-based disease pathway prediction - where accuracy improves from 88% to 97% - and variant effect prediction, BioReason demonstrates an average 15% performance gain over strong single-modality baselines. BioReason reasons over unseen biological entities and articulates decision-making through interpretable, step-by-step biological traces, offering a transformative approach for AI in biology that enables deeper mechanistic insights and accelerates testable hypothesis generation from genomic data. Data, code, and checkpoints are publicly available atthis https URL

@article{fallahpour2025_2505.23579,
  title={ BioReason: Incentivizing Multimodal Biological Reasoning within a DNA-LLM Model },
  author={ Adibvafa Fallahpour and Andrew Magnuson and Purav Gupta and Shihao Ma and Jack Naimer and Arnav Shah and Haonan Duan and Omar Ibrahim and Hani Goodarzi and Chris J. Maddison and Bo Wang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.23579},
  year={ 2025 }
}