[2604.00058] GenoBERT: A Language Model for Accurate Genotype Imputation

Quantitative Biology > Genomics arXiv:2604.00058 (q-bio) [Submitted on 31 Mar 2026] Title:GenoBERT: A Language Model for Accurate Genotype Imputation Authors:Lei Huang, Chuan Qiu, Kuan-Jui Su, Anqi Liu, Yun Gong, Weiqiang Lin, Lindong Jiang, Chen Zhao, Meng Song, Jeffrey Deng, Qing Tian, Zhe Luo, Ping Gong, Hui Shen, Chaoyang Zhang, Hong-Wen Deng View a PDF of the paper titled GenoBERT: A Language Model for Accurate Genotype Imputation, by Lei Huang and 15 other authors View PDF Abstract:Genotype imputation enables dense variant coverage for genome-wide association and risk-prediction studies, yet conventional reference-panel methods remain limited by ancestry bias and reduced rare-variant accuracy. We present Genotype Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (GenoBERT), a transformer-based, reference-free framework that tokenizes phased genotypes and uses a self-attention mechanism to capture both short- and long-range linkage disequilibrium (LD) dependencies. Benchmarking on two independent datasets including the Louisiana Osteoporosis Study (LOS) and the 1000 Genomes Project (1KGP) across ancestry groups and multiple genotype missingness levels (5-50%) shows that GenoBERT achieves the highest overall accuracy compared to four baseline methods (Beagle5.4, SCDA, BiU-Net, and STICI). At practical sparsity levels (up to 25% missing), GenoBERT attains high overall imputation accuracy ($r^2 approx 0.98$) across datasets, and maintains robust performance ($r^2 >...