arXiv Machine Learning

CocoRNA: Collective RNA Design with Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

CocoRNA is a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that tackles RNA inverse design by breaking the problem into smaller sub‑problems solved collaboratively by multiple agents. A centralized critic provides global structural guidance during training, allowing the agents to jointly optimize their design strategies. Experiments on the Rfam dataset show that CocoRNA outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods in both success rate and design speed, and additional tests on other biological sequence design tasks demonstrate its broad effectiveness.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

MORAD: Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Objective Rewards for RNA Inverse Design

MORAD is an online reinforcement learning framework that trains a single shared policy for backbone‑conditioned RNA diffusion models, enabling structure‑conditioned RNA inverse design across diverse target backbones. It integrates backbone‑conditioned group sampling, group‑relative reward normalization, and a forward‑process diffusion objective, jointly optimizing six measurements—including tertiary geometry, base pairing, ensemble behavior, and sequence composition—by mapping each to a bounded desirability score and combining them with a weighted geometric mean. Compared to a tertiary‑structure‑only reward, MORAD improves 10 of 11 evaluation metrics, achieving significant gains in GDT‑TS, pairing MCC, and normalized ensemble defect, and surpasses existing methods such as RiboDiffusion, gRNAde, and RDesign on tertiary structural accuracy, secondary‑structure pairing, and thermodynamic quality.

By Jixin Tang, Ji Guo, Jun Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 21

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.

By Ziwen Wang, Jiajun Fan, Ruihan Guo, Thao Nguyen, Heng Ji, Ge Liu
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
Oct 9

La-Ribo: RNA Co-Design via Geometry-Latent Flow Matching

La‑Ribo is a generative framework that jointly designs RNA nucleotide sequences and their three‑dimensional structures using geometry‑latent flow matching. It preserves a sparse phosphate‑sugar‑base scaffold while encoding nucleotide identity and local conformation in residue‑wise latent variables, which a shared flow network generates before an RNA‑specific decoder reconstructs all heavy atoms. The authors also built a large, quality‑controlled corpus of 168,561 RNA structures—combining experimental data with predictions from three folding models—to expand supervision, and demonstrate that La‑Ribo outperforms baselines in designability and co‑designability across sampling budgets and refolding models, while also enabling scaffold‑conditioned inverse folding without extra training.

By Runze Ma, Will Hua, Shuangjia Zheng
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

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

PGFS++ is a synthesis‑aware reinforcement learning framework that improves molecular properties such as drug‑likeness or binding affinity 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. The method addresses a reward‑hacking failure mode by treating each input molecule as the start of a forward‑synthesis trajectory, applying learned reaction templates with in‑stock building blocks, and producing diverse, high‑quality outputs with explicit synthesis routes.