Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chen, Can, Heurtel-Depeiges, David, Vernon, Robert M., Langmead, Christopher James, Bengio, Yoshua, Fournier, Quentin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Chen, Can
Heurtel-Depeiges, David
Vernon, Robert M.
Langmead, Christopher James
Bengio, Yoshua
Fournier, Quentin
author_facet Chen, Can
Heurtel-Depeiges, David
Vernon, Robert M.
Langmead, Christopher James
Bengio, Yoshua
Fournier, Quentin
contents Protein language models (pLMs) pre-trained on vast protein sequence databases excel at various downstream tasks but often lack the structural knowledge essential for some biological applications. To address this, we introduce a method to enrich pLMs with structural knowledge by leveraging pre-trained protein graph neural networks (pGNNs). First, a latent-level contrastive learning task aligns residue representations from pLMs with those from pGNNs across multiple proteins, injecting inter-protein structural information. Additionally, a physical-level task integrates intra-protein information by training pLMs to predict structure tokens. Together, the proposed dual-task framework effectively incorporates both inter- and intra-protein structural knowledge into pLMs. Given the variability in the quality of protein structures in PDB, we further introduce a residue loss selection module that uses a small model trained on high-quality structures to select reliable yet challenging residue losses for the pLM to learn. Applying our structure alignment method as a simple, lightweight post-training step to the state-of-the-art ESM2 and AMPLIFY yields notable performance gains. These improvements are consistent across a wide range of tasks, including substantial gains in deep mutational scanning (DMS) fitness prediction and a 59% increase in P@L for ESM2 650M contact prediction on CASP16. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these performance gains are robust, scaling with model sizes from 8M to 650M and extending to different downstream tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_16896
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model
Chen, Can
Heurtel-Depeiges, David
Vernon, Robert M.
Langmead, Christopher James
Bengio, Yoshua
Fournier, Quentin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Protein language models (pLMs) pre-trained on vast protein sequence databases excel at various downstream tasks but often lack the structural knowledge essential for some biological applications. To address this, we introduce a method to enrich pLMs with structural knowledge by leveraging pre-trained protein graph neural networks (pGNNs). First, a latent-level contrastive learning task aligns residue representations from pLMs with those from pGNNs across multiple proteins, injecting inter-protein structural information. Additionally, a physical-level task integrates intra-protein information by training pLMs to predict structure tokens. Together, the proposed dual-task framework effectively incorporates both inter- and intra-protein structural knowledge into pLMs. Given the variability in the quality of protein structures in PDB, we further introduce a residue loss selection module that uses a small model trained on high-quality structures to select reliable yet challenging residue losses for the pLM to learn. Applying our structure alignment method as a simple, lightweight post-training step to the state-of-the-art ESM2 and AMPLIFY yields notable performance gains. These improvements are consistent across a wide range of tasks, including substantial gains in deep mutational scanning (DMS) fitness prediction and a 59% increase in P@L for ESM2 650M contact prediction on CASP16. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these performance gains are robust, scaling with model sizes from 8M to 650M and extending to different downstream tasks.
title Structure-Aligned Protein Language Model
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16896