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:2608. 12090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have transferred the latest advances from natural language processing to computational biology.
By Roman Joeres, Ilya Senatorov, Olga V. Kalinina
arXiv:2605. 01625v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proteins are inherently multiscale physical systems whose functional properties emerge from coordinated structural organization across multiple spatial resolutions, ranging from atomic interactions to global fold topology.
By Viet Thanh Duy Nguyen, John K. Johnstone, Truong-Son Hy
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:2603. 14717v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating novel protein sequences that respect a family's statistical constraints typically requires training deep generative models on thousands to millions of examples.
By Jeffrey D. Varner
Protein language models (PLMs) have transferred the latest advances from natural language processing to computational biology. These models, trained on large corpora of protein sequence data, are widely used to translate amino acid sequences into latent-space embeddings, ready for use in diverse downstream tasks (DTs).
GyroNovo is a new framework for de novo peptide sequencing that improves fragment imputation by guiding the process with decoder errors observed during training. It introduces mass-aware attention using rotary embeddings to encode pairwise mass differences between spectral peaks, and creates easy and hard augmented views of spectra to train the decoder under varying corruption levels. Experiments on NovoBench demonstrate significant gains, with about 9 percentage points higher peptide-level precision and 7 percentage points higher amino-acid-level precision compared to the state-of-the-art baseline.
By Abdellah El Mekki, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
arXiv:2605. 16331v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Protein language models are increasingly used to guide experimental and clinical decisions, yet it is often unclear whether a confident prediction reflects recognition of biological evidence or retrieval of a statistical default.
By Piotr Jedryszek, Oliver M. Crook
arXiv:2606. 31126v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting biomolecular properties from limited labeled data is a central bottleneck in protein engineering and small-molecule design.
By Davy Guan, Lu Zhang, Asiri Wijesinghe, Allen Zhu, He Zhao, Helen Power, F. Hafna Ahmed, Andrew Warden, Cheng Soon Ong, Daniel M. Steinberg
arXiv:2606. 02629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are essential for many biological processes.
By Zaifei Yang, Samuel Ping-Man Choi, James Kwok
arXiv:2606. 16044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (pLMs) can generate novel protein sequences with properties beyond those observed in nature, yet the mechanisms underlying protein generation remain poorly understood.
By Darin Tsui, William Deinzer, Daniel Saeedi, Amirali Aghazadeh
ProbeMatchDTI introduces a probe-driven framework for drug‑target interaction prediction that preserves weak biochemical signals by using IterProbe to retain contextual states and BindingProbe to model cross‑entity complementarity at multiple scales. The method improves AUC‑ROC by 2.0% on BindingDB and 0.5% on DrugBank compared to prior biochemical representation learning approaches. Feature‑level analyses confirm the effectiveness of the probe-driven pattern matching, and the predictions are linked to an evidence‑guided downstream drug‑discovery workflow for candidate refinement and validation planning.