The Effectiveness and Durability of Pretraining Data Filtering in Protein Language Models

Pretraining filtering is one of the most common safeguards for open-weight language models. Here we study its effectiveness, durability and scalability using the ESM-2 family of protein language models. We find that filtering viral proteins from the pretraining data meaningfully degrades masked language modelling, mutation effect prediction and long-range contact prediction on viral proteins, while largely preserving performance on non-viral proteins. These effects are concentrated among proteins from human-infecting viruses, and grow as we scale models from 8M to 3B parameters. As models increase in size, we find that stringent filtering becomes more effective. However, fine-tuning on sequences from the removed viral families restores the lost performance. Although the cost to recover performance increases with model scale, even for the largest models it costs about 80 USD of H100 time. This work establishes pretraining filtering as moderately effective at selectively degrading performance on viral proteins, but not durable against fine-tuning with modest computational resources and access to relevant data.