SymFold introduces a symmetric dual‑path architecture that combines protein language models (PLMs) and multimodal protein language models (MPLMs) to iteratively guide protein sequence generation for inverse folding. By leveraging pretrained sequence evolution knowledge from PLMs and structural knowledge from MPLMs, the method improves upon the traditional serial pipeline where structure encoders produce coarse sequences refined by PLMs. Experiments on standard inverse‑folding benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the symmetric design.
By Handong Wang, Jiaxin Qi, Baisheng Lai, Jianqiang Huang
arXiv:2609.37675v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Protein Language Models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress following scaling laws established in natural language processing across sequence- and str...
By Biswajit Banerjee, Claudia Alvarez Carreno, Anton S. Petrov
arXiv:2605. 02937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning in de novo protein design has achieved atomic-level fidelity.
By Fang Wu, Weihao Xuan, Heli Qi, Hanqun Cao, Heng-Jui Chang, Zeqi Zhou, Haokai Zhao, Ma Jian, Carl Ma, Yu-Chi Cheng, Kuan Pang, Xiangru Tang, Zehong Wang, Guanlue Li, Hanchen Wang, Kejun Ying, Pan Lu, Chiho Im, Seungju Han, Peng Xia, Tinson Xu, Yinxi Li, Deyao Zhu, Pheng-Ann Heng, Naoto Yokoya, Masashi Sugiyama, Li Erran Li, Jure Leskovec, Yejin Choi
The paper introduces IDiom, an autoregressive protein language model trained on a large dataset of intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDRs) from AlphaFold, and demonstrates that it can generate sequences matching natural IDR composition, motifs, and disorder. It further presents RL‑SAE, a reinforcement learning approach that uses sparse autoencoder features to steer generation toward specific functional patterns, achieving high activation of targeted features and improved predicted subcellular localization and transcriptional activity. The combination of IDiom and RL‑SAE allows interpretable, composable IDR design by explicitly controlling function‑associated sequence features.
By Jason X. Liu, Sebastian Ibarraran, Frank Hu, Soojung Yang, Xinyu A. Feng, Abigail Park, Anagha Aneesh, Lacramioara Bintu, Alexander R. Dunn, Grant M. Rotskoff
arXiv:2607. 02140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chemical language models (CLMs) are trained with linearized representations such as SMILES, yet it remains unclear which chemically meaningful substructures they encode.
By Anna Karnysheva, Dietrich Klakow, Ji-Ung Lee
arXiv:2602. 02320v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Molecular function is largely determined by structure.
By Feiyang Cai, Guijuan He, Yi Hu, Jingjing Wang, Joshua Luo, Tianyu Zhu, Srikanth Pilla, Gang Li, Ling Liu, Feng Luo
MolSC is a new dataset of 181,000 substituent-level examples that captures how attaching specific substituents to molecular scaffolds changes properties such as bioactivity and physicochemical descriptors. The authors also provide MolSC-Bench, a held‑out benchmark of 1,541 examples that are disjoint from MolSC at scaffold, substituent, and molecule levels. Experiments show that training molecular large language models on MolSC markedly improves their ability to predict substituent contributions, outperforming existing models on a range of downstream chemistry tasks.
By Hyuntae Park, Sooyeon Kim, Jiwon Park, SangKeun Lee
The paper reports a large-scale, compute-controlled study of Chemical Language Models (CLMs) involving over 30,000 experiments across different molecular representations, tokenizations, model sizes, datasets, and architectures. It finds clear scaling trends in pretraining loss but shows that these improvements do not translate into proportional gains in goal-directed molecular design, with chemical syntax saturating early while semantic properties develop more slowly. The authors release a new suite of models, NovoMolGen, that achieves state-of-the-art results in drug discovery tasks, highlighting a disconnect between representation learning and downstream design and calling for new pretraining paradigms that target chemical semantics.
By Roshan Balaji, Kamran Chitsaz, Quentin Fournier, Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt, Sarath Chandar
The study evaluates four pretrained molecular language models on six virtual libraries covering drug discovery, organic materials, and catalysis. It finds that native embeddings vary widely in performance, while molecular fingerprints remain consistently strong. Fine‑tuning the models on library‑specific data markedly improves sample efficiency, with several adapted encoders outperforming others across all tasks.
By Henrik Wille, Luis-Finley Sch\"utz, Felix Strieth-Kalthoff
arXiv:2605.16581v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Masked language modeling (MLM) is the standard objective for training protein language models, typically implemented by randomly masking individual...
By Thomas Walton, Ayan Goel, Amirali Aghazadeh
The paper investigates how guided protein language models can collapse onto off‑manifold representations when heavily steered to optimize a property. This collapse causes generated sequences to become low‑complexity and statistically similar to random amino‑acid input, yet the property oracle may still rate them highly. The authors propose a cheap, training‑free Mahalanobis filtering step that removes such off‑manifold candidates, improving both property scores and structural plausibility without altering the generator.
CODesign is a co-design framework that jointly generates protein sequences and structures to improve consistency between them. It introduces a large consistency‑distilled dataset of about 105,000 dimers and employs a multimodal joint flow model with a consistency‑aware resampling strategy to iteratively refine sequences and side chains. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art in silico success rates for protein‑ and ligand‑target binder design, with ablation studies showing a 70.9% performance boost from the distilled dataset and further gains from the resampling mechanism.
By Yuanle Mo, Bo Qiang, Haitao Lin, Qinghan Wang, Gang Du, Odin Zhang, Pheng Ann Heng