  Ribonucleic acid (RNA) plays a variety of crucial roles in fundamental
biological processes. Recently, RNA has become an interesting drug target,
emphasizing the need to improve our understanding of its structures and
functions. Over the years, sequencing technologies have produced an enormous
amount of unlabeled RNA data, which hides important knowledge and potential.
Motivated by the successes of protein language models, we introduce RiboNucleic
Acid Language Model (RiNALMo) to help unveil the hidden code of RNA. RiNALMo is
the largest RNA language model to date with $650$ million parameters
pre-trained on $36$ million non-coding RNA sequences from several available
databases. RiNALMo is able to extract hidden knowledge and capture the
underlying structure information implicitly embedded within the RNA sequences.
RiNALMo achieves state-of-the-art results on several downstream tasks. Notably,
we show that its generalization capabilities can overcome the inability of
other deep learning methods for secondary structure prediction to generalize on
unseen RNA families. The code has been made publicly available on
https://github.com/lbcb-sci/RiNALMo.
