---
language:
- rna
library_name: transformers
tags:
- RNA
- language-model
license: apache-2.0
---

# ERNIE-RNA-SS

ERNIE-RNA fine-tuned on RNA secondary structure (SS) prediction, backbone only.
The prediction head has been discarded; only the encoder weights are included.

## Architecture

| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Layers | 12 |
| Attention heads | 12 |
| Embedding dimension | 768 |
| FFN dimension | 3072 |
| Vocabulary size | 25 |
| Positional encoding | Sinusoidal (fairseq-style) |
| Architecture | Post-LN Transformer with recurrent 2D RNA pairing bias |
| Max sequence length | 1024 |

See [Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA](https://huggingface.co/Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA) for the vocabulary table and
full architecture description.

## Pretraining + Fine-tuning

- **Pretraining objective:** Masked language modeling on RNAcentral
- **Fine-tuning task:** RNA secondary structure prediction (base-pair prediction)
- **Fine-tuning data:** RNA3DB
- **Source checkpoint:** `RNA3DB.pt`

### Checkpoint selection

Six SS fine-tuned checkpoints were available (bpRNA-1m, bpRNA-new, RIVAS, RNA3DB,
RNAStralign, bpRNA-1m_RNAStralign). All six were evaluated via linear probing on three
tasks from [mRNABench](https://huggingface.co/collections/morrislab/mrnabench): RNA
subcellular localization (`rna-loc-fazal`), mRNA half-life prediction (`rnahl-human`),
and variant effect prediction (`vep-traitgym-mendelian`).

`bpRNA-new` was excluded: its backbone is identical to the pretrained ERNIE-RNA checkpoint
(the backbone was frozen during SS fine-tuning), making it equivalent to `Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA`.

The remaining five were evaluated via linear probing on three tasks from
[mRNABench](https://huggingface.co/collections/morrislab/mrnabench): RNA subcellular
localization, mRNA half-life prediction, and variant effect prediction. `RNA3DB` was the
best-performing checkpoint across all three tasks and was selected for this release.

## Parity Verification

Backbone weights are extracted directly from the fine-tuned checkpoint using the same
key mapping and architecture as the verified pretrained model. The underlying architecture
is identical to [Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA](https://huggingface.co/Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA), which was
verified at max abs diff = 1.82e-06 across all 13 representation levels.

Only `attn_implementation="eager"` is supported (see Implementation Notes).

## Related Models

See the full [ERNIE-RNA collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/Taykhoom/ernie-rna-6a20c1a8ea56c00a74e2dd93).

| Model | Notes |
|---|---|
| [Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA](https://huggingface.co/Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA) | Pretrained model |
| **[Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA-SS](https://huggingface.co/Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA-SS)** | **This model — SS fine-tuned** |
| [Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA-MRL](https://huggingface.co/Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA-MRL) | UTR MRL fine-tuned |

## Usage

### Embedding generation

```python
import torch
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA-SS", trust_remote_code=True)
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("Taykhoom/ERNIE-RNA-SS", trust_remote_code=True)
model.eval()

sequences = ["AUGCAUGCAUGC", "GGGGCCCCGGGG"]
enc = tokenizer(sequences, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)

with torch.no_grad():
    out = model(**enc)

cls_emb   = out.last_hidden_state[:, 0, :]   # (batch, 768) -- CLS token
token_emb = out.last_hidden_state             # (batch, seq_len, 768)

# Intermediate layers
out_all = model(**enc, output_hidden_states=True)
layer6_emb = out_all.hidden_states[6]         # (batch, seq_len, 768)
```

### Fine-tuning

Use the CLS token embedding (`last_hidden_state[:, 0, :]`) as input to a prediction head
for sequence-level tasks. For token-level tasks (e.g. base-pair prediction), use
`last_hidden_state` directly.

## Implementation Notes

ERNIE-RNA's recurrent 2D bias is updated from the pre-softmax attention scores at every
layer (the raw QK logits become the bias input for the next layer). Fused attention kernels
(SDPA, FlashAttention) do not expose pre-softmax scores, so they cannot maintain this
recurrent pathway. Only `attn_implementation="eager"` is supported; requesting `sdpa` or
`flash_attention_2` raises a `ValueError`.

The `twod_proj` MLP is always run in float32 (matching the original) regardless of the
model's compute dtype.

## Citation

```bibtex
@article{yin2025_ernierna,
  title   = {{ERNIE-RNA}: an {RNA} language model with structure-enhanced representations},
  author  = {Yin, Weijie and Zhang, Zhaoyu and He, Liang and Jiang, Rui and Zhang, Shuo and Liu, Gan and Zeng, Xuezhi and Zhao, Wen and Gao, Xiaowo},
  journal = {Nature Communications},
  volume  = {16},
  number  = {1},
  pages   = {8407},
  year    = {2025},
  doi     = {10.1038/s41467-025-64972-0}
}
```

## Credits

Original model and code by Yin et al. Source: [GitHub](https://github.com/Bruce-ywj/ERNIE-RNA).
The HF conversion code was authored primarily by [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code)
and reviewed manually by Taykhoom Dalal.

## License

Apache 2.0, following the original repository.