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Main Authors: Ghaffari, Saba, Saleh, Ehsan, Schwing, Alexander G., Wang, Yu-Xiong, Burke, Martin D., Sinha, Saurabh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13650
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author Ghaffari, Saba
Saleh, Ehsan
Schwing, Alexander G.
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Burke, Martin D.
Sinha, Saurabh
author_facet Ghaffari, Saba
Saleh, Ehsan
Schwing, Alexander G.
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Burke, Martin D.
Sinha, Saurabh
contents Protein design, a grand challenge of the day, involves optimization on a fitness landscape, and leading methods adopt a model-based approach where a model is trained on a training set (protein sequences and fitness) and proposes candidates to explore next. These methods are challenged by sparsity of high-fitness samples in the training set, a problem that has been in the literature. A less recognized but equally important problem stems from the distribution of training samples in the design space: leading methods are not designed for scenarios where the desired optimum is in a region that is not only poorly represented in training data, but also relatively far from the highly represented low-fitness regions. We show that this problem of "separation" in the design space is a significant bottleneck in existing model-based optimization tools and propose a new approach that uses a novel VAE as its search model to overcome the problem. We demonstrate its advantage over prior methods in robustly finding improved samples, regardless of the imbalance and separation between low- and high-fitness samples. Our comprehensive benchmark on real and semi-synthetic protein datasets as well as solution design for physics-informed neural networks, showcases the generality of our approach in discrete and continuous design spaces. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/sabagh1994/PGVAE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_13650
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Model-Based Optimization for Challenging Fitness Landscapes
Ghaffari, Saba
Saleh, Ehsan
Schwing, Alexander G.
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Burke, Martin D.
Sinha, Saurabh
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Protein design, a grand challenge of the day, involves optimization on a fitness landscape, and leading methods adopt a model-based approach where a model is trained on a training set (protein sequences and fitness) and proposes candidates to explore next. These methods are challenged by sparsity of high-fitness samples in the training set, a problem that has been in the literature. A less recognized but equally important problem stems from the distribution of training samples in the design space: leading methods are not designed for scenarios where the desired optimum is in a region that is not only poorly represented in training data, but also relatively far from the highly represented low-fitness regions. We show that this problem of "separation" in the design space is a significant bottleneck in existing model-based optimization tools and propose a new approach that uses a novel VAE as its search model to overcome the problem. We demonstrate its advantage over prior methods in robustly finding improved samples, regardless of the imbalance and separation between low- and high-fitness samples. Our comprehensive benchmark on real and semi-synthetic protein datasets as well as solution design for physics-informed neural networks, showcases the generality of our approach in discrete and continuous design spaces. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/sabagh1994/PGVAE.
title Robust Model-Based Optimization for Challenging Fitness Landscapes
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13650