arXiv AI

PepEVOLVE: Position-Aware Dynamic Peptide Optimization via Group-Relative Advantage

PepEVOLVE is a dynamic, position‑aware framework for optimizing macrocyclic peptides that learns where to edit and how to improve multiple properties. It enhances pretraining with dynamic masking and CHUCKLES shifting, employs a multi‑armed‑bandit router to identify high‑reward residues, and uses an evolving optimization algorithm with group‑relative advantage to stabilize updates. In in‑silico tests on a Rev‑binding macrocycle benchmark, PepEVOLVE surpassed PepINVENT, achieving higher permeability‑weighted scores and converging faster while respecting structural constraints.

arXiv AI
Aug 13

A Modular Agentic Framework for Synthetically Constrained Multi-Objective Hit-to-Lead Optimization

arXiv:2608. 11483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hit-to-lead optimization requires iterative design of hit analogs across competing potency, selectivity, physicochemical, pharmacokinetic, safety, and synthetic constraints.

By Kelvin P. Idanwekhai, Enes Kelestemur, Benjamin Strickland, Matthew Hart, Steini Davidsson, Angelos Angelopoulos, Ron Alterovitz, Marcello DeLuca, Alexander Tropsha
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Pepti-drift: Scalable Safe-Active Peptide Generation Without Inference-Time Guidance

Pepti-drift is a one‑step peptide generation framework that uses a single latent refinement and parallel decoding, avoiding costly inference‑time guidance. It incorporates attraction toward target‑specific binders and repulsion from liability‑associated regions, achieving an 18.37% predicted Safe‑Active yield across 88 held‑out targets. The method delivers competitive gains to multi‑property‑guided baselines while reducing generation cost by 468×, enabling scalable and fair high‑throughput peptide design.

By Takashi Fujiwara, Hikaru Shindo, Kaushalya Madhawa, Jun Jin Choong, Shuan Chen, Yuna Oikawa, Yiming Zhang, Gyubok Lee, Keisuke Ozawa
arXiv AI
Oct 26

ReMedI: Inference-Time Refinement and Self-Distillation for Controllable Molecular Optimization

ReMedI introduces an inference‑time refinement framework that combines a pre‑trained molecular language model with a Metropolis‑Hastings search to perform multi‑objective optimization of drug leads. The method proposes edits conditioned on the current molecule and refines them to improve properties, preserve lead similarity, and maintain scaffold integrity. Experiments on C‑MuMOInstruct and SMDD benchmarks show that ReMedI outperforms RL‑based baselines, achieving higher success rates and requiring far fewer training leads.

By Jia Yi Zhang, Shivanshu Shekhar, Allison McLevige, Tong Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

On the Design Space of Discrete Diffusion Online Adaptation for Molecular Optimization

arXiv:2607. 02834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular optimization often starts from a pretrained generative model that captures a broad prior over valid molecular structures.

By Trevor Chen, Ariel Dai, Jason Yang, Riccardo De Santi, Daniel Khalil, Wenda Chu, Nate Gruver, Pranav Murugan, Alexander F. G. Goldberg, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Yisong Yue
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Probe Before You Edit: Probing-Guided Molecular Optimization for LLM Agents in Structure-Based Drug Design

arXiv:2606. 00555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structure-based drug design increasingly employs LLM agents to iteratively refine ligands against a target pocket, yet a viable ligand must satisfy two often-conflicting objectives -- binding affinity and druggability -- which single optimization steps rarely improve together.

By Zaifei Yang, Weiyu Chen, Yaqing Wang, James Kwok