How Do You Know When Bio Models Are Done Training?

An epoch sounds precise. In the simplest version of machine learning, it is just one complete pass through the training data. But when you are training a biological foundation model across enormous sequence datasets, saving checkpoints along the way, and measuring several different kinds of performance, “How many epochs?” stops being the most useful question.The better question is whether additional training is still producing meaningful biological improvement. A model can continue learning according to one metric while producing very little additional value according to another. Training loss