Wang: Shuffling gene order does not alter expression biology
Bo Wang · 🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu) · Jul 21, 2026 · at 42:03
Bo Wang, Chief AI Scientist at Xaira Therapeutics, explains why treating gene expression data as sequentially ordered tokens like text in autoregressive LLMs is biologically unnatural.
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“For DNA sequences, the order of ATTG make total sense to us, right? But for expression data, they're literally just matrices. So it's really hard to assume, ah, an inherent order of genes. Even if we shuffle the order of genes, I think the biology doesn't change much.”
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