TaxDistill: Improving Metagenomic Taxonomic Annotation via Distilled Genomic Foundation Models

In three linesTaxDistill applies knowledge distillation to improve metagenomic taxonomic annotation. GenomeOcean, a 500M-parameter genomic foundation model, generates soft labels to train a lightweight student network, reducing noise from initial retrieval tools. On 7 CAMI2 datasets, TaxDistill improves MMseqs2's F1 score from 0.763 to 0.941 on the Gastrointestinal dataset.

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