Scaling and quantization of large-scale foundation model enables resource-efficient predictions in network biology

Foundation models for network biology are pretrained on large-scale biological data to enable context-aware predictions in a diverse array of downstream tasks through transfer learning. However, increasing model sizes with the expansion of available pretraining data also increases the computational resources required for fine-tuning and inference in downstream applications. Here we first assemble a corpus comprising ~104 million human single-cell transcriptomes from a broad range of tissues and diseases and pretrain successively larger models, defining the scaling laws for transcriptional masked learning. We then demonstrate that model quantization preserves the contextual gene and cell embedding space of the full-precision model, matching performance in zero-shot and fine-tuning applications while requiring only 15% of the time and 34% of the memory as the full model for fine-tuning with the same batch size. Overall, model quantization represents an effective method for resource-efficient fine-tuning and inference while preserving biological knowledge.