Biological Continued Pretraining Reshapes the Capability Profile of a Foundation Model Without Catastrophic Forgetting
It is widely assumed that continued pretraining (CPT) on a narrow, out-of-distribution corpus such as raw biological sequence must trade away a general-purpose model’s broad competence — the “alignment tax” or catastrophic-forgetting intuition. We test this directly, without any new training, by re-analyzing three chec...