The paper introduces AssayBench-Loop, a large benchmark of 1,389 CRISPR screens across five phenotype categories, and builds on it to develop AssayLoop, a sequential experimental design framework that combines a transformer-based acquisition policy (AssayFormer) trained on historical data with LLM-derived biological priors. AssayLoop achieves a 5.67‑fold enrichment over random selection, recovering 27.7% of hits after testing only about 5% of the library, and outperforms existing adaptive-design methods and standalone LLMs. The authors also present AssayLLM, extending the approach directly to an LLM via task‑specific post‑training, and show that performance improves with more historical training data and transfers to unseen phenotype categories.
arXiv:2608. 00152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting the magnitude of a CRISPRi perturbation's transcriptomic effect on held-out target genes is an important open problem in single-cell biology.
arXiv:2608. 12219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Treating patients with combinations of drugs reduces the risk of resistance to any individual drug.
The paper introduces Online Surrogate Repair (OSR), a closed‑loop algorithm that decouples the frequency of high‑fidelity evaluations from the length of an agent’s search by selectively updating a surrogate model with sparse, high‑fidelity data. An acquisition rule determines which candidate designs receive expensive evaluations, and the resulting labels refine the surrogate for subsequent episodes. Experiments on synthetic environments and the MADE benchmark show that OSR can reduce regret more efficiently than fixed‑surrogate approaches, requiring fewer oracle queries than high‑fidelity feedback after every episode.
The paper introduces OmicsBench, a new reasoning benchmark for multi‑omics sequences that includes 1,160 expert‑validated questions across DNA regulation, RNA processing, and protein function tasks, requiring traceable evidence chains. Evaluation of 17 large language models shows that scientific LLMs, while more accurate in classification, often lack valid evidence, suggesting shortcut learning. To address this, the authors propose tool‑augmented on‑policy distillation (TA‑OPD), a post‑training method that improves both evidence grounding and predictive performance across five Qwen3.5 models of varying sizes.
arXiv:2606. 02624v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI for scientific discovery is entering an agentic era, where protein-engineering systems are expected to prioritize future wet-lab experiments rather than merely fit static measurements.
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.
arXiv:2609.36679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning engineering (MLE) agents have made substantial progress, but learning through ML experimentation remains costly in time and computatio...
arXiv:2609.37285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laboratories often face a new molecular assay with 16-64 labels and a bank of predictors whose training data and parameters are unavailable. The practi...
The study evaluates a frozen Geneformer representation for predicting CRISPRi perturbation effects under a tightly controlled, pre‑registered protocol. While the representation shows significant predictive power within the Virtual Cell Challenge dataset, it fails to transfer to external screens, with negative zero‑shot Spearman correlations. The analysis also reveals that the VCC endpoint is heavily influenced by sampling depth, as cell count alone explains most of the variance, indicating a sampling‑depth entanglement that could mask transfer failures in less controlled settings.
arXiv:2606. 28659v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-fidelity molecular docking simulations can produce biologically relevant estimates of epitope-receptor binding affinity but are computationally expensive and therefore limit the number of candidates that can be screened for vaccine design.
arXiv:2608. 19906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurately ranking active ligands for a target protein pocket from massive chemical libraries remains a central challenge in virtual screening.
arXiv:2609.24302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Virtual screening aims to prioritize active compounds from large chemical libraries within a limited experimental budget. When applying Boltz-2 to vi...