arXiv:2609.00518v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Antibody-specific language models pretrained via masked language modeling (MLM) learn representations that are critical for downstream sequence design...
By Ayan Goel, Thomas A. Walton, Amirali Aghazadeh
PFArena is a new benchmark for evaluating language models in protein modification tasks, featuring four controlled interfaces that span single‑mutant generation and multi‑mutant ranking. It incorporates varying levels of mutation fitness data to represent four research scenarios with different amounts of prior experimental context. The benchmark tests six protein language models, six large language models, and five LLM‑based agents, finding that PLMs excel at open‑ended single‑mutant generation while LLMs and agents perform best in multi‑mutant ranking when target‑specific data are available, yet all struggle as search space and mutation depth grow.
By Yawen Ouyang, Xinbo Zhang, Ziyuan Ma, Yixin Wu, Wenbin Liao, Feiran Zhang, Wenjie Li, Lihao Wang, Hao Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuefeng Yan, Lei Bai, Ya-Qin Zhang, Shuyi Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Dahua Lin, Bowen Zhou, Hao Zhou
Protein modification requires navigating an immense sequence space, yet wet-lab validation remains low-throughput and costly. Although computational paradigms including protein language models (PLMs),...
arXiv:2607. 16263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Antibody expression ranking is a critical task in antibody design, yet its modelling is severely hindered by the scarcity of labeled experimental data.
By Josh Qixuan Sun, Morteza Babaie, Wenyang Hou, Mark Crowley, David Young
arXiv:2605.16581v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Masked language modeling (MLM) is the standard objective for training protein language models, typically implemented by randomly masking individual...
By Thomas Walton, Ayan Goel, Amirali Aghazadeh
The paper investigates how guided protein language models can collapse onto off‑manifold representations when heavily steered to optimize a property. This collapse causes generated sequences to become low‑complexity and statistically similar to random amino‑acid input, yet the property oracle may still rate them highly. The authors propose a cheap, training‑free Mahalanobis filtering step that removes such off‑manifold candidates, improving both property scores and structural plausibility without altering the generator.