The End of Aging Clocks: Training Foundation Models to Reason in Aging and Longevity
Journal:
bioRxiv
Published Date:
Mar 30, 2026
Abstract
The aging clock paradigm has yielded dozens of specialist models that can estimate chronological age or mortality from virtually any biodata type. Yet each such model operates within a fixed modality, relies on a predetermined feature set, and produces limited biological interpretation. Here, we report Longevity-LLM v0.1, a Qwen3-14B model fine-tuned through supervised and reinforcement learning regimes on DNA methylation, proteomics, clinical biomarker, and RNA expression data. Longevity-LLM achieves high ranks in the recently announced Longevity Bench, including such tasks as cancer survival and RNA- or proteome-based age prediction. After reinforcement fine-tuning, the model achieved a 4.34-year MAE in epigenetic age prediction, surpassing the Horvath multi-tissue clock. In addition to age prediction, Longevity-LLM can carry out numerous other tasks, including proteomic profile generation, for which it significantly outperforms all frontier LLMs. These results demonstrate that a single modestly sized LLM can match or replace purpose-built aging clocks across data modalities. This work constitutes an interim report from the initial sprint of our Multi-Modal AI Gym for Science (MMAI), an initiative dedicated to building foundation models for drug discovery and aging research.
