An Empirical Analysis of Fine-Tuning Large Language Models on Bioinformatics Literature: PRSGPT and BioStarsGPT
About
Large language models (LLMs) often lack specialized knowledge for complex bioinformatics applications. We present a reproducible pipeline for fine-tuning LLMs on specialized bioinformatics data, demonstrated through two use cases: PRSGPT, focused on polygenic risk score (PRS) tools, and BioStarsGPT, trained on community forum discussions. The nine-step pipeline integrates diverse data sources, structured preprocessing, prompt-based question-answer (QA) generation (via Google Gemini), natural language inference (NLI) for quality control, semantic deduplication, clustering-based data splitting, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning using LoRA. We fine-tuned three LLMs (LLaMA-3.2-3B, Qwen2.5-7B, Gemma) and benchmarked them on over 14 lexical and semantic metrics. Qwen2.5-7B emerged as the best performer, with BLEU-4 and ROUGE-1 improvements of 82\% and 70\% for PRSGPT and 6\% and 18\% for BioStarsGPT, respectively. The open-source datasets produced include over 28,000 QA pairs for PRSGPT and 154,282 for BioStarsGPT. Human evaluation of PRSGPT yielded 61.9\% accuracy on the PRS tools comparison task, comparable to Google Gemini (61.4\%), but with richer methodological detail and accurate citations. BioStarsGPT demonstrated 59\% conceptual accuracy across 142 curated bioinformatics questions. Our pipeline enables scalable, domain-specific fine-tuning of LLMs. It enables privacy-preserving, locally deployable bioinformatics assistants, explores their practical applications, and addresses the challenges, limitations, and mitigation strategies associated with their development and use.