arXiv AI

CausalBind: Causal Modeling and Learning for Protein-Molecule Virtual Screening

CausalBind introduces a causal modeling framework for protein‑molecule virtual screening that focuses on sparse cross‑modality interactions rather than dense holistic alignment. By formalizing a V‑structure causal model with Heckman‑style selection, the authors prove that latent interaction concepts are identifiable only under sparsity constraints and propose three implementation variants. Experiments on DUD‑E and LIT‑PCBA benchmarks demonstrate that all variants outperform strong retrieval baselines, especially in early enrichment and out‑of‑distribution generalization.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Monroe: A Molecular Foundation Model for In-Context Probabilistic Inference

Monroe is a new molecular foundation model that improves upon existing models by pre‑training on over 81 million molecules from the PM6 quantum chemistry dataset, enhancing stereochemistry representation, and introducing novel training losses such as conformer denoising and embedding decorrelation. It also incorporates a prior‑data‑fitted model (TabPFN) for downstream in‑context prediction and demonstrates superior performance on Polaris benchmarks and activity cliff tests. Ablation studies show that the PFN‑based downstream approach can upgrade other models, producing state‑of‑the‑art variants MiniMol_PFN and CheMeleon_PFN.

By Blazej Banaszewski, Andrew W. Fitzgibbon
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Molecular Property Prediction under Structural Shift with Tabular Foundation Models

The paper introduces MolPAIR, a framework that enhances tabular foundation models (TFMs) for predicting molecular properties under structural shifts by incorporating molecule-level and molecular-pair contexts without task‑specific parameter updates. MolPAIR refines initial predictions from a global TFM by using a second frozen TFM to predict differences in prediction errors between a query molecule and labeled reference molecules. Experiments on 58 MoleculeACE and Polaris tasks show that MolPAIR improves performance on 46 tasks across multiple molecular representations and TFM backbones, demonstrating that explicit molecular comparisons strengthen tabular in‑context learning for structural generalization.

By Jinmo Lee, Dooho Lee, Minho Jeong, Jaemin Yoo
arXiv AI
Sep 3

ProbeMatchDTI: Probe-Driven Multi-Scale Biochemical Pattern Matching for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

ProbeMatchDTI is a new framework for drug‑target interaction prediction that uses probe‑driven pattern matching to preserve weak biochemical signals. It introduces IterProbe, which retains contextual states across refinement depths and selects them with learnable probes, and BindingProbe, which models drug‑protein complementarity at both local and whole‑pair levels. Experiments show that ProbeMatchDTI outperforms existing methods, improving AUC‑ROC by 2.0% on BindingDB and 0.5% on DrugBank, and its predictions can be integrated into downstream drug‑discovery workflows.

By Quan Hao, Mengyue Fan, Zifan Dong, Youru Li, Jianduo Zhao, Lechuan Xu, Hao Zhang, Fei Xia, Jigang Wang, Chong Qiu, Liguo Zhang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

ProbeMatchDTI: Probe-Driven Multi-Scale Biochemical Pattern Matching for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

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.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

Mol-JEPA: A multimodal Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Molecules

Mol-JEPA is a scalable multimodal framework that learns molecular world models by using modality masking instead of suboptimal perturbations. It incorporates diverse data such as molecular structures, cellular phenotypes, binding affinities, ADMET profiles, quantum chemistry simulations, and other drug‑discovery information. Benchmarks show that the representations it learns perform strongly, highlighting the benefit of embedding biochemical context via latent‑space prediction.

By Florian Rottach, Sebastian Schieferdecker, William Rudman, Randall Balestriero, Carsten Eickhoff
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Interpreting Protein Language Model Embeddings via Orthogonal Projection for Protein Fitness Prediction

The paper introduces a method that uses orthogonal projection to remove the influence of known biochemical features from protein language model (PLM) embeddings, allowing the authors to assess how much these features contribute to protein fitness predictions. By applying this technique to high‑order and interaction effects, they demonstrate that eliminating these interpretable features reduces downstream classifier performance, indicating that PLM embeddings encode patterns correlated with biochemical properties. The authors also show that these biochemical features explain a substantial portion of the variance in the classifier’s predictions, suggesting that PLM embeddings capture biologically relevant information.

By Paulo Yanez Sarmiento, Pia Francesca Rissom, Manuel Pfeuffer, Marco Simnacher, Jordan F. Safer, Sumaiya Iqbal, Henrike O. Heyne, Nadja Klein, Bernhard Y. Renard
arXiv AI
Jul 23

Causal dictionary learning reveals and validates transcription-factor binding features in genomic language models

arXiv:2607. 19618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Genomic language models achieve strong performance across regulatory-genomics tasks, yet what these models internally represent remains opaque, and the field lacks a principled procedure for verifying that an apparent ``concept'' inside a model is real rather than an artifact of sequence composition.

By Sarwan Ali
arXiv AI
Aug 26

MolEmb: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Be Strong Molecular Embedding Models

MolEmb is a lightweight framework that adapts multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to serve as general molecular embedding models. By aligning molecular profiles with textual descriptions in a shared embedding space using a bidirectional contrastive objective, MolEmb produces embeddings conditioned on both a molecular profile and a natural‑language semantic context. The model performs competitively on molecular property prediction and enables cross‑modal molecule‑text retrieval, while the newly introduced MolCAR benchmark demonstrates that context‑aware molecular embedding is largely a data property of the supervision.

By Xinjian Zhao, Xiangru Jian, Yaoyao Xu, Xiaozhuang Song, Wei Pang, Lei Bai, Tianshu Yu
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Fraglingo: Molecular Design via Attachment-Aware Autoregressive Fragment Generation

Fraglingo is an autoregressive fragment-based molecular generator that jointly models fragment identity and attachment in a continuous latent space. It predicts attachment-aware fragment embeddings using a wildcard-anchored readout that captures the growing molecule’s active attachment site, then retrieves the next fragment via latent-space nearest-neighbor search. This approach allows new fragments to be added at inference time without retraining and achieves stronger joint property control on benchmarks while maintaining high validity, uniqueness, and novelty.

By Thao Nguyen, Jeonghwan Kim, Zhenhailong Wang, Heng Ji