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.
arXiv:2608. 12090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have transferred the latest advances from natural language processing to computational biology.
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).
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.
arXiv:2610.07607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model-guided directed evolution seeks to identify high-fitness protein variants under limited oracle budgets. Protein language models (PLMs) provide...
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.
arXiv:2609.08059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Acidophilic proteins that remain stable and functional under highly acidic conditions, are important for industrial biocatalysis, acid-related biopro...
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.
ProtModernBERT is a modernized BERT-style protein language model that reduces training cost by incorporating architectural refinements, achieving performance comparable to larger models while cutting pre‑training FLOPs by 80‑90%. The authors benchmark ProtModernBERT against ProtBert, Amplify, and ESM2 on supervised structural tasks and a zero‑shot functional benchmark, showing it matches or closely tracks Amplify‑120M and ProtBert. Their cluster‑based validation and random‑init experiments reveal that modern architectural components provide stronger inductive biases than parameter count in low‑compute regimes.
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...
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.
Large protein language models provide a powerful framework for learning sequence-function relationships and guiding experimental design. However, architectural improvements are underexplored, especial...
arXiv:2610.18456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-based cellular perturbation prediction is essential to accelerate drug discovery and therapeutic identification. However, perturbation-specific si...