Microsoft Research: discarding singleton proteins in PLM training is likely wrong

KevinKaichuang · x · 2026-08-18

A Microsoft Research / Brown preprint argues the common practice of discarding metagenomic "singletons" in PLM pretraining is probably wrong. Singletons make up 43% of the 3.34B-sequence GigaRef atlas; many show high homology and higher Pfam domain density per length, representing the long tail of functional diversity most valuable for model training.

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