arXiv AI By Dan Ofer, Dafna Shahaf, Michal Linial

ProteinJEPA: Latent prediction improves protein language model pretraining

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ProteinJEPA introduces a joint‑embedding predictive architecture that supplements masked language modeling (MLM) with a cosine loss to predict latent representations of a teacher model. On 19 protein tasks, MLM+JEPA outperforms compute‑matched and step‑matched MLM‑only training across 78 and 76 of 114 comparisons, achieving notable gains on structure‑ and homology‑sensitive tasks such as SCOPe‑40 retrieval and remote homology. Ablation studies show the cosine loss is superior to mean squared error and that latent prediction complements rather than replaces MLM.

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