arXiv Machine Learning

Discrete Ricci Curvature on Protein Contact Graphs for Lightweight Fold Classification

arXiv:2607. 16553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein fold classification can be approached via sequence-based representations or structural descriptors, but direct comparisons between lightweight handcrafted descriptors and pretrained protein language model embeddings remain limited.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

CurvFlow-DTA: dual-graph discrete Ricci curvature flow for drug--target affinity prediction

CurvFlow-DTA introduces a dual-graph discrete Ricci curvature flow framework for drug–target affinity prediction, replacing static curvature with weighted Forman curvature flow on both drug and protein residue–residue contact graphs. The method precomputes a label‑independent flow trajectory for each entity and uses a pair‑conditioned selector to guide a dual‑branch Flow‑GINE, leveraging frozen ESM‑2 residue representations. Experiments on Davis and KIBA datasets show significant improvements over the Ricci‑GraphDTA baseline, with reductions in mean squared error of up to 19.9% in warm‑start and 27.4% in cold‑start settings, and higher concordance indices across benchmarks.

By Jicheng Ma, Yunyan Yang, Juan Zhao, Liang Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Interpreting Latent Protein Language Model Features with Geometric Annotations

The paper introduces a scalable method to interpret sparse autoencoder (SAE) features in the ESM-2 protein language model by leveraging geometrically inspired features of the protein α‑carbon backbone. Across 8M layers of ESM-2, a false discovery rate–controlled analysis shows that local geometry is significantly associated with many SAE features, revealing substructure within known biological labels and enabling annotation of unannotated metagenomic proteins. Ablation experiments demonstrate that removing these geometric features shifts ESM-2’s predicted contact maps toward the descriptor, linking mechanistic interpretability with structural biology.

By Siddharth Setlur, Djordje Mihajlovic, Darrick Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

When do cheap embeddings beat protein language models? A theoretically-grounded hashing sketch for biological sequence classification

The paper introduces Murmur2Vec, a lightweight, alignment‑free embedding that uses k‑mer counts hashed with MurmurHash to create a compact representation for biological sequences. It provides a full theoretical analysis, including bias/variance formulas, a Johnson–Lindenstrauss‑style concentration bound, and an excess‑risk bound that clarifies the trade‑off between hash‑table size and classifier performance. Empirically, Murmur2Vec matches or surpasses a fine‑tuned 650M‑parameter ESM‑2 protein language model across several classification tasks, including SARS‑CoV‑2 spike lineage and HIV‑1 Env subtype identification.

By Sarwan Ali, Taslim Murad, Imdadullah Khan, Safi Faizullah
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Geometric Flow enhanced Graph Coarsening

The paper introduces RicciPool, a graph pooling method that incorporates higher‑order connectivity via Ollivier‑Ricci curvature to reweight edges before spectral clustering. Unlike traditional pooling approaches that focus only on rough topology, RicciPool leverages local connection information to improve cluster assignment. Experiments on protein and social network datasets demonstrate its effectiveness.

By Chaoqun Fei, Guoxuan Li, Tinglve Zhou, Chuanqing Wang, Yangyang Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Learning Topological Representations for Molecular Dynamics

arXiv:2606. 14737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations generate trajectories in a high-dimensional configuration space whose analysis critically depends on molecular descriptors, typically handcrafted observables or learned kinetic embeddings.

By Dominik Geng, Florian Graf, Martin Uray, Roland Kwitt