A variant pathogenicity classifier, trained on North African-representative genomic data, designed to reduce the VUS rate in Moroccan clinical genomics.
# AtlasGen-SLM
> A ~15M parameter genomic language model for variant pathogenicity classification in North African and Moroccan populations.
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## The Problem
Genomic AI tools are trained almost exclusively on Western European data. When they encounter a variant they've never seen — which happens constantly with North African genomes — they return "Variant of Uncertain Significance." Not because the variant is actually uncertain. Because the training data never included it.
That lands as a VUS — a result that's technically inconclusive — for Moroccan and Maghrebi patients at a much higher rate than for European ones. Resolving a VUS means more testing, more time, more cost. In Morocco's healthcare system, those aren't abstract problems.
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## What AtlasGen-SLM Does
It's a variant pathogenicity classifier. Feed it a genomic variant, get back a probability: benign, pathogenic, or uncertain. The difference from existing tools is the training data — built around African, Maghrebi, and Moroccan genomes rather than European ones.
It runs offline. The trained weights sit on disk. No API, no cloud, no per-query cost. A clinic with no stable internet can run it.
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## How It Works
```
Input: variant (chr, pos, ref, alt)
↓
Extract 1024bp window from GRCh38 around the variant position
Inject the alternate allele at the variant site
↓
Tokenize into overlapping 6-mers (vocab: 4,096 tokens)
↓
Pass through encoder-only transformer (~15M parameters)
↓
Output: Benign / Pathogenic / Uncertain + confidence score
```
Training runs in four sequential phases — global pretraining, African and Maghrebi fine-tuning, Moroccan specialization, then supervised pathogenicity classification. Details in `docs/architecture.md`.
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## Model Specs
| | |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Encoder-only transformer |
| Parameters | ~15M |
| Tokenization | 6-mer sliding window, vocab 4,096 |
| Sequence input | 1024bp VCF-guided flanks |
| Training hardware | 8GB VRAM |
| Attention | FlashAtte …