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
MT-ProtBERT is a multi‑task extension of ProtBERT designed for classifying intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) in low‑data settings. It combines Dynamic Window Masking, a Multi‑Scale 1D Convolutional classifier, and auxiliary biochemistry‑informed objectives to jointly optimize masked language modeling and domain‑specific tasks. In experiments on phosphorylation site prediction and protein compaction prediction, MT‑ProtBERT outperforms the RNN‑based IDP model PARROT across all limited‑data tasks.
By Jian Sun, Kingshuk Ghosh, Lilianna Houston, Mohammad H. Mahoor
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
arXiv:2506. 07459v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protein generative models have shown remarkable promise in protein design, yet their success rates remain constrained by reliance on curated sequence-structure datasets and by misalignment between supervised objectives and real design goals.
By Ziwen Wang, Jiajun Fan, Ruihan Guo, Thao Nguyen, Heng Ji, Ge Liu
SimpleDesign is a single-stage, end-to-end model for joint protein sequence and structure design that eliminates the need for multi-stage training. It combines discrete cross-entropy for sequences with a regression objective for structures, using a Mixture-of-Transformer architecture to handle modality-specific processing while maintaining global self-attention. Trained on over 2 million sequence-structure pairs, SimpleDesign achieves strong performance on co-design and unconditional generation benchmarks.
By Jiarui Lu, Yuyang Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Jiatao Gu, Navdeep Jaitly, Joshua M. Susskind, Miguel \'Angel Bautista
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
The study evaluates 4‑bit quantization and low‑rank adapter fine‑tuning (QLoRA) on several large protein language models, finding that many model‑task pairs retain over 90% of full fine‑tuning performance while achieving up to 90% GPU memory savings. QLoRA preserves early‑layer representations and induces task‑specific changes in later layers, closely resembling full fine‑tuning with smaller representational shifts. For generative models, 4‑bit quantization largely maintains structural and sequence‑level properties, though token‑level analysis reveals model‑dependent changes in autoregressive output distributions.
By Ilan Yaniv Zeisler, Sebastian Clancy, Pouriya Bayat, Saaim Raad, Ivan Kraskov, Matthew Xie, Vivian White, Spencer Perkins, Serena Singh, Sepehr Bayat, Keith Pardee
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
InsightSR is a new framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with the PySR genetic programming engine to refine symbolic regression search spaces. It employs two LLM-guided pathways: a Semantic Seed Pathway that generates dimensionally consistent functional skeletons, and a Structural Feature Pathway that suggests nonlinear feature transformations. Over successive iterations, these pathways expand the input space and shift the search toward shallow, semantically informed trees, with a feedback loop that evaluates and refines candidate features. The method achieves a 95% exact recovery rate on the Feynman benchmark and 80.18% accuracy on the LLM-SRBench LSR-Transform task, outperforming existing genetic programming and neural-symbolic approaches while preserving strong out-of-distribution generalization.
By Yating Ling, Wenjing Cun, Zhitang Chen
arXiv:2606. 27440v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models for structural biology have achieved remarkable performance in predicting biomolecular structure and show promise for the design of proteins and small molecules.
By Giosue Migliorini, Aristofanis Rontogiannis, Grigori Guitchounts, Nicholas Franklin, Axel Elaldi, Olivia Viessmann
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
ProtLingo is a protein language modeling framework that enhances a pretrained single‑sequence Transformer backbone with conditional local memory and sparse expert routing. It maps residue representations into discrete codes, composes local windows into latent N‑gram addresses, and retrieves reusable residual signals for recurring sequence contexts. The model also converts selected feed‑forward blocks into sparse Mixture‑of‑Experts layers, allowing residue‑dependent computation while activating only a subset of parameters, achieving competitive performance on protein fitness prediction, FLIP benchmarks, and supervised contact prediction with a 150M‑parameter backbone.
By Mingrui Li, Sixian Shen, Minzhang Li, Ruiyi Zhang, Kexin Zhang, Jiakai Zhang, Jingyi Yu