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DeMoP: A Language-Model-Guided Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Cancer Prognosis

Tang, C.; Yu, L.; Li, Q.; Xu, L.

2026-08-27 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.08.24.746579 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Integrating heterogeneous clinical and molecular data for cancer prognosis remains challenging because their dimensionality, semantics and distributions differ across patients and cohorts. Here we present DeMoP, a language-model-guided mixture-of-experts framework that serializes structured patient profiles as natural-language sequences and learns adaptive prognostic representations from clinical variables, copy-number alterations, and gene descriptions. DeMoP combines a fine-tuned DeBERTa-v3-large encoder, attention-based token pooling, and a residual mixture-of-experts prediction head. In held-out tests from two independent pan-cancer cohorts, GENIE (63,090 patients) and TCGA (4,123 patients), DeMoP outperformed the conventional machine-learning and deep-learning baselines evaluated, achieving AUROCs of 0.939 and 0.805 and class-1 F1 scores of 0.72 in both cohorts. A GENIE-trained model transferred directly to TCGA with an overall class-1 F1 score of 0.62. Gene-level ablations recovered established cancer-associated genes and highlighted less-studied candidates. DeMoP provides a unified approach to heterogeneous biomedical data integration, cross-cohort outcome prediction, and model interpretation.

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