AbFlowNet: Optimizing Antibody-Antigen Binding Energy via Diffusion-GFlowNet Fusion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Abir, Abrar Rahman, Shahgir, Haz Sameen, Ratul, Md Rownok Zahan, Tahmid, Md Toki, Steeg, Greg Ver, Dong, Yue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Abir, Abrar Rahman
Shahgir, Haz Sameen
Ratul, Md Rownok Zahan
Tahmid, Md Toki
Steeg, Greg Ver
Dong, Yue
author_facet Abir, Abrar Rahman
Shahgir, Haz Sameen
Ratul, Md Rownok Zahan
Tahmid, Md Toki
Steeg, Greg Ver
Dong, Yue
contents Complementarity Determining Regions (CDRs) are critical segments of an antibody that facilitate binding to specific antigens. Current computational methods for CDR design utilize reconstruction losses and do not jointly optimize binding energy, a crucial metric for antibody efficacy. Rather, binding energy optimization is done through computationally expensive Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) pipelines rely heavily on unreliable binding energy estimators. In this paper, we propose AbFlowNet, a novel generative framework that integrates GFlowNet with Diffusion models. By framing each diffusion step as a state in the GFlowNet framework, AbFlowNet jointly optimizes standard diffusion losses and binding energy by directly incorporating energy signals into the training process, thereby unifying diffusion and reward optimization in a single procedure. Experimental results show that AbFlowNet outperforms the base diffusion model by 3.06% in amino acid recovery, 20.40% in geometric reconstruction (RMSD), and 3.60% in binding energy improvement ratio. ABFlowNet also decreases Top-1 total energy and binding energy errors by 24.8% and 38.1% without pseudo-labeling the test dataset or using computationally expensive online RL regimes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12358
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AbFlowNet: Optimizing Antibody-Antigen Binding Energy via Diffusion-GFlowNet Fusion
Abir, Abrar Rahman
Shahgir, Haz Sameen
Ratul, Md Rownok Zahan
Tahmid, Md Toki
Steeg, Greg Ver
Dong, Yue
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Complementarity Determining Regions (CDRs) are critical segments of an antibody that facilitate binding to specific antigens. Current computational methods for CDR design utilize reconstruction losses and do not jointly optimize binding energy, a crucial metric for antibody efficacy. Rather, binding energy optimization is done through computationally expensive Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) pipelines rely heavily on unreliable binding energy estimators. In this paper, we propose AbFlowNet, a novel generative framework that integrates GFlowNet with Diffusion models. By framing each diffusion step as a state in the GFlowNet framework, AbFlowNet jointly optimizes standard diffusion losses and binding energy by directly incorporating energy signals into the training process, thereby unifying diffusion and reward optimization in a single procedure. Experimental results show that AbFlowNet outperforms the base diffusion model by 3.06% in amino acid recovery, 20.40% in geometric reconstruction (RMSD), and 3.60% in binding energy improvement ratio. ABFlowNet also decreases Top-1 total energy and binding energy errors by 24.8% and 38.1% without pseudo-labeling the test dataset or using computationally expensive online RL regimes.
title AbFlowNet: Optimizing Antibody-Antigen Binding Energy via Diffusion-GFlowNet Fusion
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12358