arXiv Machine Learning

ProteinZero: Self-Improving Protein Generation via Online Reinforcement Learning

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.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

AgentFold: Closed-Loop Agentic Search for Protein Folding Model Design

AgentFold is a multi‑agent framework that treats protein‑folding model design as a closed‑loop search over executable code variants. Starting from the ESMFold codebase, the agents generate hypotheses, modify and debug code, evaluate model variants, and store both successes and failures in structured memory, guided by an MCTS‑style policy that allocates GPU resources. In an engineering‑scale experiment, AgentFold explored about 80 variants using 5,000 GPU‑hours and 170 million LLM tokens, improving the best lDDT score by 7.5% over independent Codex proposals and outperforming a random‑search baseline, while also uncovering empirical design patterns such as the benefits of early, soft, learnable priors.

By Mingquan Liu, Jiangyu Chen, Hanqun Cao, Xujun Zhang, Pengsen Ma, Xiangru Tang, Shuting Jin, Zhuo Yang, Tianfan Fu, Fang Wu, Xiangxiang Zeng
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels.

arXiv AI
3d ago

SymFold: Synergizing Evolutionary and Structural Priors for Accurate Protein Inverse Folding

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
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
Aug 19

Leveraging generative hallucination and biophysics-informed modeling for unified biomolecular sequence-structure co-design

The paper introduces MCTH (Monte Carlo Tree Hallucination), an inference-only framework that performs all‑atom biomolecular sequence‑structure co‑design by treating pretrained folding and inverse‑folding models as black‑box operators. MCTH uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to allocate a fixed inference budget across competing design trajectories, incorporating model confidence, uncertainty, and cross‑expert consensus. Experiments across protein‑RNA, protein‑DNA, protein‑protein, and protein‑ligand design show that adaptive search outperforms simpler sampling strategies, and evaluations with AlphaFold3 and Chai‑1 demonstrate transferability beyond the search‑time oracle.

By Xuefeng Liu, Mingxuan Cao, Xiao Luo, Songhao Jiang, Tobin Sosnick, Jinbo Xu, Louis Maher, Rick Stevens
arXiv AI
Jun 29

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Protein Sequence Generation with Targeted Amino-Acid Composition

arXiv:2606. 27939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Protein language models are standard priors for biological sequence generation, but steering them toward explicit distributional design targets remains largely unexplored.

By Violeta Basten-Romero, Rub\'en Mu\~noz-Tafalla, Anna Mar\'ia D\'iaz-Rovira, Bertran Miquel-Oliver, Isaac Filella-Merce, V\'ictor Guallar
arXiv AI
Aug 20

PGFS++: Molecular Property Improvement under Synthesis and Diversity Constraints

PGFS++ is a synthesis‑aware reinforcement learning framework that improves molecular properties while ensuring the resulting molecules can be synthesized and remain structurally similar to the input. It builds on PGFS+ by using trainable embedding lookup tables for reaction templates and second reactants, a more effective scoring function, and a refined RL algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that PGFS++ enhances target properties and preserves high output diversity, overcoming the reward‑hacking failure mode seen in earlier versions.

By Boqiao Zhang, Godbless James, Sai Krishna Gottipati, Andrew Fitzgibbon