arXiv AI
Oct 2

Pepti-drift: Scalable Safe-Active Peptide Generation Without Inference-Time Guidance

Pepti-drift is a one‑step peptide generation framework that uses a single latent refinement and parallel decoding, avoiding costly inference‑time guidance. It incorporates attraction toward target‑specific binders and repulsion from liability‑associated regions, achieving an 18.37% predicted Safe‑Active yield across 88 held‑out targets. The method delivers competitive gains to multi‑property‑guided baselines while reducing generation cost by 468×, enabling scalable and fair high‑throughput peptide design.

By Takashi Fujiwara, Hikaru Shindo, Kaushalya Madhawa, Jun Jin Choong, Shuan Chen, Yuna Oikawa, Yiming Zhang, Gyubok Lee, Keisuke Ozawa
arXiv AI
Oct 31

PepEVOLVE: Position-Aware Dynamic Peptide Optimization via Group-Relative Advantage

PepEVOLVE is a dynamic, position‑aware framework for optimizing macrocyclic peptides that learns where to edit and how to improve multiple properties. It enhances pretraining with dynamic masking and CHUCKLES shifting, employs a multi‑armed‑bandit router to identify high‑reward residues, and uses an evolving optimization algorithm with group‑relative advantage to stabilize updates. In in‑silico tests on a Rev‑binding macrocycle benchmark, PepEVOLVE surpassed PepINVENT, achieving higher permeability‑weighted scores and converging faster while respecting structural constraints.

By Trieu Nguyen, Hao-Wei Pang, Shasha Feng
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 21

Ensemble-Aware Structural Encoding (EASE): Conditioning Protein Encoders on Peptide Conformational Ensembles

Ensemble-Aware Structural Encoding (EASE) is a new framework that conditions protein encoders on peptide conformational ensembles rather than single sequences or structures. By selecting central conformers that capture a peptide’s major structural states and fusing their representations with a permutation‑invariant operator, EASE produces a peptide‑level representation that better reflects conformational variability. In evaluations on six peptide property‑prediction tasks, EASE consistently outperforms single‑structure baselines, achieving an average absolute gain of about 3.0% and improving further as more conformers are incorporated.

By Ruoyao Zhang, Hongxuan Li, Jie Peng, Tianlong Chen