# bioMoR: Biology-Guided Mixture-of-Recursions for Effective Genomic Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06727 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06727/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Universal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03819/) (2018)
- [Green AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10597/) (2019)
- [Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09368/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Computation Time for Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08983/) (2016)
- [Nystr"omformer: A Nystr"om-Based Algorithm for Approximating Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03902/) (2021)
- [Mixture-of-Recursions: Learning Dynamic Recursive Depths for Adaptive Token-Level Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10524/) (2025)
- [Graph Transformer-Based Pathway Embedding for Cancer Prognosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16685/) (2026)
- [Integrating gene regulatory priors into Transformer attention with scTransformer for interpretable scRNA-seq analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09558/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer models for high-dimensional omics analysis process thousands of genes or pathways, although only a subset requires deep computation. Mixture-of-Recursions (MoR) improves efficiency through adaptive token-choice or expert-choice routing. We propose bioMoR, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first framework to apply MoR to gene-level and pathway-level learning. Our contributions include identifying three locations for integrating structured biological knowledge within an MoR backbone: graph-based information sharing refines token embeddings, a structural bias guides self-attention toward biologically related tokens, and a graph-aware router uses neighborhood information to determine each token's recursion depth. These techniques are centered on our insight that additional knowledge of token interaction can effectively help models construct embeddings and select which tokens should be learned more deeply. Across eight benchmarks spanning diverse omics data types and evaluated under a unified five-fold cross-validation protocol, bioMoR improves average macro-F1 by 8.2 percentage points and balanced accuracy by 7.1 percentage points over the strongest biology-agnostic MoR baseline while using 75 percent fewer parameters and up to 58 percent fewer FLOPs than a non-recursive Transformer. The selected marker genes or pathways provide biological interpretability, while their token-specific recursion depths reveal how computation is allocated.