LongevityBench: Are SotA LLMs ready for aging research?

Aging is a core biological process observed in most species and tissues, which is studied with a vast array of technologies. We argue that the abilities of AI systems to emulate aging and to accurately interpret biodata in its context are the key criteria to judge an LLM’s utility in biomedical research. Here, we present LongevityBench — a collection of tasks designed to assess whether foundation models grasp the fundamental principles of aging biology and can use low-level biodata to arrive at phenotype-level conclusions. The benchmark covers a variety of prediction targets including human time-to-death, mutations’ effect on lifespan, and age-dependent omics patterns. It spans all common biodata types used in longevity research: transcriptomes, DNA methylation profiles, proteomes, genomes, clinical blood tests and biometrics, as well as natural language annotations. After ranking state-of-the-art foundation models using LongevityBench, we highlight their weaknesses and outline procedures to maximize their utility in aging research and life sciences.