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
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: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
arXiv:2608.29207v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Protein structure modeling rests on a single computational primitive: the interaction between what a residue is (sequence content) and where it sits (t...
By Yifan Feng, Guanjie Cheng, Shihui Ying, Shaoyi Du, Yue Gao
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:2602. 06020v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How do protein structure prediction models fold proteins?
By Kevin Lu, Jannik Brinkmann, Stefan Huber, Aaron Mueller, Yonatan Belinkov, David Bau, Chris Wendler
arXiv:2506. 13196v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is critical for drug discovery.
By Han Liu, Keyan Ding, Peilin Chen, Yinwei Wei, Liqiang Nie, Dapeng Wu, Shiqi Wang
SymFold introduces a symmetric dual‑path architecture that combines protein language models (PLMs) and multimodal protein language models (MPLMs) to iteratively guide protein sequence generation for inverse folding. By leveraging pretrained sequence evolution knowledge from PLMs and structural knowledge from MPLMs, the method improves upon the traditional serial pipeline where structure encoders produce coarse sequences refined by PLMs. Experiments on standard inverse‑folding benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance, and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the symmetric design.
By Handong Wang, Jiaxin Qi, Baisheng Lai, Jianqiang Huang
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:2609.37384v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Molecular representation learning is central to computer-aided drug discovery. Molecular graphs, SMILES strings, and 3D conformations provide complemen...
By Linqing Mo, Jiayu Zhou, Bin Chen
CODesign is a co-design framework that jointly generates protein sequences and structures to improve consistency between them. It introduces a large consistency‑distilled dataset of about 105,000 dimers and employs a multimodal joint flow model with a consistency‑aware resampling strategy to iteratively refine sequences and side chains. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art in silico success rates for protein‑ and ligand‑target binder design, with ablation studies showing a 70.9% performance boost from the distilled dataset and further gains from the resampling mechanism.
By Yuanle Mo, Bo Qiang, Haitao Lin, Qinghan Wang, Gang Du, Odin Zhang, Pheng Ann Heng
arXiv:2607. 03787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurately modeling biomolecular interactions is a central bottleneck in biology and therapeutic discovery.
By Aureka AI OpenDDE project