Pseudo-perplexity in One Fell Swoop for Protein Fitness Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kantroo, Pranav, Wagner, Günter P., Machta, Benjamin B.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Kantroo, Pranav
Wagner, Günter P.
Machta, Benjamin B.
author_facet Kantroo, Pranav
Wagner, Günter P.
Machta, Benjamin B.
contents Protein language models trained on the masked language modeling objective learn to predict the identity of hidden amino acid residues within a sequence using the remaining observable sequence as context. They do so by embedding the residues into a high dimensional space that encapsulates the relevant contextual cues. These embedding vectors serve as an informative context-sensitive representation that not only aids with the defined training objective, but can also be used for other tasks by downstream models. We propose a scheme to use the embeddings of an unmasked sequence to estimate the corresponding masked probability vectors for all the positions in a single forward pass through the language model. This One Fell Swoop (OFS) approach allows us to efficiently estimate the pseudo-perplexity of the sequence, a measure of the model's uncertainty in its predictions, that can also serve as a fitness estimate. We find that ESM2 OFS pseudo-perplexity performs nearly as well as the true pseudo-perplexity at fitness estimation, and more notably it defines a new state of the art on the ProteinGym Indels benchmark. The strong performance of the fitness measure prompted us to investigate if it could be used to detect the elevated stability reported in reconstructed ancestral sequences. We find that this measure ranks ancestral reconstructions as more fit than extant sequences. Finally, we show that the computational efficiency of the technique allows for the use of Monte Carlo methods that can rapidly explore functional sequence space.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07265
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pseudo-perplexity in One Fell Swoop for Protein Fitness Estimation
Kantroo, Pranav
Wagner, Günter P.
Machta, Benjamin B.
Biomolecules
Genomics
Protein language models trained on the masked language modeling objective learn to predict the identity of hidden amino acid residues within a sequence using the remaining observable sequence as context. They do so by embedding the residues into a high dimensional space that encapsulates the relevant contextual cues. These embedding vectors serve as an informative context-sensitive representation that not only aids with the defined training objective, but can also be used for other tasks by downstream models. We propose a scheme to use the embeddings of an unmasked sequence to estimate the corresponding masked probability vectors for all the positions in a single forward pass through the language model. This One Fell Swoop (OFS) approach allows us to efficiently estimate the pseudo-perplexity of the sequence, a measure of the model's uncertainty in its predictions, that can also serve as a fitness estimate. We find that ESM2 OFS pseudo-perplexity performs nearly as well as the true pseudo-perplexity at fitness estimation, and more notably it defines a new state of the art on the ProteinGym Indels benchmark. The strong performance of the fitness measure prompted us to investigate if it could be used to detect the elevated stability reported in reconstructed ancestral sequences. We find that this measure ranks ancestral reconstructions as more fit than extant sequences. Finally, we show that the computational efficiency of the technique allows for the use of Monte Carlo methods that can rapidly explore functional sequence space.
title Pseudo-perplexity in One Fell Swoop for Protein Fitness Estimation
topic Biomolecules
Genomics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07265