arXiv Machine Learning

Where Black-box Drug-Target Interaction Prediction Models Look: Cross-Method Explainability

arXiv:2606. 14245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) and affinity (DTA) predictors increasingly achieve strong benchmark scores, yet their internal use of sequence, fingerprint, and graph features often remains opaque.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

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

ProbeMatchDTI introduces a probe-driven framework for drug‑target interaction prediction that preserves weak biochemical signals by using IterProbe to retain contextual states and BindingProbe to model cross‑entity complementarity at multiple scales. The method improves AUC‑ROC by 2.0% on BindingDB and 0.5% on DrugBank compared to prior biochemical representation learning approaches. Feature‑level analyses confirm the effectiveness of the probe-driven pattern matching, and the predictions are linked to an evidence‑guided downstream drug‑discovery workflow for candidate refinement and validation planning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

VINCENT: Validated Interaction Network for Cross-drug Explanation of Therapeutics

VINCENT is a post‑training framework that provides validated, chemically coherent explanations for drug synergy predictions by extracting atom‑pair evidence from attention and gradient signals, grouping them into motifs, and refining these motifs through repeated local perturbations. On a literature‑annotated subset of 25 drug pairs, VINCENT achieves a mean motif recall of 0.826, outperforming baselines (0.49–0.66). Across 71 test pairs, its validated interaction scores yield a TP/TN separation of 3.36, indicating more accurate recovery of literature‑supported molecular regions and better alignment with predictor behavior.

By Fan-Sheng Chuang, Xuchen Li, Yujing Bian, Kaixiong Zhou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Predicting Therapeutic Outcome via Aligning Patient-Specific Knowledge Graph and Gene-Level Perturbation Representations

Accurate prediction of patient-specific therapeutic response from pre-treatment transcriptomes is hindered by the scarcity of matched clinical response labels and post-treatment molecular profiles. Preclinical transfer-learning models can simulate drug-induced expression changes but are often hard to interpret and unstable, whereas knowledge-graph methods provide mechanistic context yet remain static and fail to capture drug-induced transcriptomic perturbation dynamics.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

Explainable AI for Cancer Drug Response Prediction: Beyond Univariate Feature Attributions

arXiv:2607. 00931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting cancer drug response from transcriptomic profiles is a cornerstone of precision oncology, yet the scientific value of machine learning models hinges not solely on predictive accuracy, but also on their capacity to generate reliable biological insights.

By Martino Ciaperoni, Margherita Lalli, Simone Piaggesi, Martina Varisco, Francesco Carli, Riccardo Guidotti, Dino Pedreschi, Francesco Raimondi, Fosca Giannotti
arXiv AI
Sep 25

SMILESGNN: Interpretable Clinical Toxicity Prediction via SMILES-Graph Cross-Attention Fusion

SMILESGNN is a multimodal architecture that fuses a SMILES Transformer encoder with a GATv2 graph encoder through cross‑attention, enabling interpretable clinical toxicity predictions. The model retains an explicit graph branch, allowing GNNExplainer to identify substructures linked to toxicity. On the ClinTox dataset it achieves an AUC‑ROC of 0.987 and F1 of 0.906 with only 0.4 M parameters, while on Tox21 it attains a mean AUC‑ROC of 0.750, comparable to strong single‑modality baselines.

By Quang Minh Nguyen, Thuy Quynh Nguyen, Duc Minh Le, Ho Nhat Minh Nguyen, Thanh Long Dai Doan, Trong Nghia Nguyen