MiRformer: a dual-transformer-encoder framework for predicting microRNA-mRNA interactions from paired sequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
MOTIVATION: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) regulate gene expression by binding to target messenger RNAs (mRNAs), inducing translational repression or mRNA degradation. Accurate prediction of miRNA-mRNA interactions and precise localization of binding and cleavage sites are critical for understanding post-transcriptional regulation and for enabling RNA therapeutics. Existing computational methods often rely on handcrafted or indirect features, scale poorly to kilobase-long mRNA sequences, or provide limited interpretability. RESULTS: We present MiRformer, a transformer-based framework that jointly predicts miRNA-mRNA interactions and localizes miRNA binding and cleavage sites directly from raw sequence pairs. MiRformer employs a dual-transformer encoder architecture for miRNA and mRNA sequences and incorporates a sliding-window attention mechanism to efficiently model kilobase-long mRNA contexts while preserving nucleotide-level resolution. Across multiple benchmrks, MiRformer achieves state-of-the-art performance on interaction prediction, binding-site localization, and cleavage-site identification from experimental Human Degradome-seq data. Beyond accuracy, MiRformer provides strong interpretability: attention patterns consistently highlight miRNA seed regions within 500-nt mRNA windows, revealing clear and biologically meaningful interaction signals. When applied to jointly infer binding and cleavage sites across 13k miRNA-mRNA pairs, predicted sites frequently co-localize, supporting a miRNA-mediated degradation mechanism. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Python code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/li-lab-mcgill/miRformer.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
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".