Deciphering 3'UTR Mediated Gene Regulation Using Interpretable Deep Representation Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 3' untranslated regions (3'UTRs) of messenger RNAs contain many important cis-regulatory elements that are under functional and evolutionary constraints. It is hypothesized that these constraints are similar to grammars and syntaxes in human languages and can be modeled by advanced natural language techniques such as Transformers, which has been very effective in modeling complex protein sequence and structures. Here 3UTRBERT is described, which implements an attention-based language model, i.e., Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). 3UTRBERT is pre-trained on aggregated 3'UTR sequences of human mRNAs in a task-agnostic manner; the pre-trained model is then fine-tuned for specific downstream tasks such as identifying RBP binding sites, m6A RNA modification sites, and predicting RNA sub-cellular localizations. Benchmark results show that 3UTRBERT generally outperformed other contemporary methods in each of these tasks. More importantly, the self-attention mechanism within 3UTRBERT allows direct visualization of the semantic relationship between sequence elements and effectively identifies regions with important regulatory potential. It is expected that 3UTRBERT model can serve as the foundational tool to analyze various sequence labeling tasks within the 3'UTR fields, thus enhancing the decipherability of post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".