TaxDistill: Improving Metagenomic Taxonomic Annotation via Distilled Genomic Foundation Models

arXiv:2605.28868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Metagenomic taxonomic annotation aims to identify the microbial origins of DNA fragments in environmental samples. Traditional methods that rely on sequence similarity are often constrained by the high microbial diversity and the incompleteness of reference databases, which has motivated the development of learning approaches such as Taxometer that perform post hoc correction to learn more informative metagenomic sequence representations. However,