Publications.

Google Scholar
Granularity in submission

When Is Rank-1 Steering Cheap? Geometry, Granularity, and Budgeted Search

John T. Robertson, Jianing Zhu, Haris Vikalo, Zhangyang Wang
We formalize rank-1 activation steering as a budget-constrained search and introduce concept granularity as a predictor of intervention difficulty. The resulting GRACE workflow makes interventions on LLMs cheaper and more reliable. In submission, 2026.
Site Code
NextVir PLOS Comp Bio 2025

NextVir: Enabling Classification of Tumor-Causing Viruses with Genomic Foundation Models

John T. Robertson, Shorya Consul, Haris Vikalo
We adapt genomic foundation models with LoRA fine-tuning for viral mixture separation, achieving state-of-the-art oncoviral DNA classification. PLOS Computational Biology, 2025.
Paper Code
XVir JCB 2025

XVir: A Transformer-Based Architecture for Identifying Viral Reads from Cancer Samples

Shorya Consul, John T. Robertson, Haris Vikalo
We develop a transformer model for classifying oncoviral DNA from cancer samples. Presented at the CNB-MAC workshop, ACM Conference on Bioinformatics (2023). Journal of Computational Biology, 2025.
Paper Code