Flip the strand and DNA language models change their answer; MirrorDNA cuts both strands at mirrored points to give one prediction
DNA language models usually tokenize, train and test on one strand, so a sequence and its reverse complement can get different predictions. MirrorDNA uses a symmetric router that cuts both strands at mirrored positions and proves the whole model is equivariant to the reverse complement. On 12 strand-symmetric Nucleotide Transformer tasks it reaches an MCC of 0.491 on both strands, against 0.152, 0.187 and 0.080 for NT-v2, DNABERT-2 and HyenaDNA.