Portrait of Lola Le Breton is unavailable

Lola Le Breton

lola.lebreton@mila.quebec
PhD - Polytechnique Montréal
Supervisor
Sarath Chandar
Research Topics
AI for Science
Computational Biology
Deep Learning
Natural Language Processing
Single-Cell Genomics
Website
GitHub

Publications

pLM representations unlock metagenomic space beyond homology
Lola Le Breton
David Heurtel-Depeiges
Douglas C. Millar
Lara E. Zetzsche
Robert M. Vernon
Christopher J. Langmead
Sarath Chandar
Quentin Fournier
Metagenomic sequencing has uncovered billions of proteins from uncultured microorganisms, vastly expanding the known protein space. Yet most… (see more) remain functionally inaccessible because existing annotation methods depend on close homologs or accurate structure predictions. Here, we show that protein language models (pLMs) can unlock this diversity only when their training data are appropriately curated. We introduce Residue Embedding Diversity (RED), a metric for protein quality assessment orders of magnitude cheaper than likelihood, and a calibration task that measures model alignment with natural evolutionary distributions. We discover a fundamental trade-off between evolutionary calibration and structural modeling, establishing training data composition as a primary determinant of pLM behavior. Finally, we successfully retrieve diverse enzyme candidates from billions of metagenomic sequences and validate their expression in vivo .
2026-07-29
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
NeoBERT: A Next-Generation BERT
Lola Le Breton
Quentin Fournier
Mariam El Mezouar
John Xavier Morris
A. Chandar
Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of … (see more)large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.
2025-06-02
TMLR (accepted)
doi.org
openreview.net