arXiv Machine Learning

Benchmarking Peptide-Protein Affinity Prediction Across Peptide and Target Shifts

arXiv AI
Jul 29

Beyond Predictive Accuracy: A Reliability-Aware Audit of Molecular Representations for Human Olfaction

arXiv:2607. 24848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained molecular encoders are commonly evaluated through downstream prediction, but predictive accuracy alone does not establish that a learned representation captures reproducible scientific structure, adds information beyond strong conventional baselines, or transfers out of distribution.

By Kai Lun Huang (California State University, Fullerton), Wei Chieh Sun (University of Washington)
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Coarse composition suffices: tabular in-context learning for multi-activity antimicrobial peptide profiling

The study demonstrates that a simple, sequence-only approach using 330 interpretable descriptors and the TabPFN tabular foundation model can outperform complex multimodal deep learning methods for multi-label antimicrobial peptide activity prediction. On the ESCAPE benchmark (82,359 peptides, five labels), a label‑powerset TabPFN model achieved a mean average precision of 77.8%, surpassing the previous best of 72.1%. The approach also shows that predicted structure is unnecessary, that a small set of global physicochemical scalars can recover most performance, and that modeling label dependence benefits rare activities and informs assay prioritization.

By Raunak Kumar, Anuj Pal, Dhruvi Solanki, Parikshit Pareek, Juhi Singh, Jitin Singla
arXiv AI
1d ago

ProbeMatchDTI: Probe-Driven Multi-Scale Biochemical Pattern Matching for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

ProbeMatchDTI is a new framework for drug‑target interaction prediction that uses probe‑driven pattern matching to preserve weak biochemical signals. It introduces IterProbe, which retains contextual states across refinement depths and selects them with learnable probes, and BindingProbe, which models drug‑protein complementarity at both local and whole‑pair levels. Experiments show that ProbeMatchDTI outperforms existing methods, improving AUC‑ROC by 2.0% on BindingDB and 0.5% on DrugBank, and its predictions can be integrated into downstream drug‑discovery workflows.

By Quan Hao, Mengyue Fan, Zifan Dong, Youru Li, Jianduo Zhao, Lechuan Xu, Hao Zhang, Fei Xia, Jigang Wang, Chong Qiu, Liguo Zhang
arXiv AI
2d ago

FLaG: Frequency-Domain Latent-attention Gated Pooling for Token Aggregation

FLaG (Frequency‑Domain Latent‑attention Gated Pooling) is a plug‑in token‑aggregation module that transforms encoder outputs into the Fourier domain, summarizes spectral tokens with learnable latent queries, applies a sample‑conditioned channel gate, and reconstructs modulated token representations for downstream pooling. The method is evaluated on antimicrobial peptide activity prediction, CIFAR‑10/100 image classification, and several RoBERTa language tasks, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on most metrics. Analyses show that FLaG emphasizes low‑frequency components while selectively amplifying high‑frequency signals in later layers, providing a transferable frequency‑domain bias across protein, visual, and textual representations.

By Kewei Li, Rongying Zhang, Xueli Wang, Xiwen Gong, Zhongjian Wang, Qiuchen Zhao, Lan Huang, Ruochi Zhang, Fengfeng Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Transformer-Based Active Learning for Data-Efficient Vaccine Epitope Selection in PRRS

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.

By Aspen Erlandsson Brisebois, Zahed Khatooni, Connor Burbridge, Brook Byrns, Heather L. Wilson, Sureesh Tikoo, Steven Rayan, Gordon Broderick