Conditionally Site-Independent Neural Evolution of Antibody Sequences

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lu, Stephen Zhewen, Vermani, Aakarsh, Sanno, Kohei, Lu, Jiarui, Matsen, Frederick A, Jagota, Milind, Song, Yun S.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Lu, Stephen Zhewen
Vermani, Aakarsh
Sanno, Kohei
Lu, Jiarui
Matsen, Frederick A
Jagota, Milind
Song, Yun S.
author_facet Lu, Stephen Zhewen
Vermani, Aakarsh
Sanno, Kohei
Lu, Jiarui
Matsen, Frederick A
Jagota, Milind
Song, Yun S.
contents Common deep learning approaches for antibody engineering focus on modeling the marginal distribution of sequences. By treating sequences as independent samples, however, these methods overlook affinity maturation as a rich and largely untapped source of information about the evolutionary process by which antibodies explore the underlying fitness landscape. In contrast, classical phylogenetic models explicitly represent evolutionary dynamics but lack the expressivity to capture complex epistatic interactions. We bridge this gap with CoSiNE, a continuous-time Markov chain parameterized by a deep neural network. Mathematically, we prove that CoSiNE provides a first-order approximation to the intractable sequential point mutation process, capturing epistatic effects with an error bound that is quadratic in branch length. Empirically, CoSiNE outperforms state-of-the-art language models in zero-shot variant effect prediction by explicitly disentangling selection from context-dependent somatic hypermutation. Finally, we introduce Guided Gillespie, a classifier-guided sampling scheme that steers CoSiNE at inference time, enabling efficient optimization of antibody binding affinity toward specific antigens.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_18982
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Conditionally Site-Independent Neural Evolution of Antibody Sequences
Lu, Stephen Zhewen
Vermani, Aakarsh
Sanno, Kohei
Lu, Jiarui
Matsen, Frederick A
Jagota, Milind
Song, Yun S.
Machine Learning
Populations and Evolution
Common deep learning approaches for antibody engineering focus on modeling the marginal distribution of sequences. By treating sequences as independent samples, however, these methods overlook affinity maturation as a rich and largely untapped source of information about the evolutionary process by which antibodies explore the underlying fitness landscape. In contrast, classical phylogenetic models explicitly represent evolutionary dynamics but lack the expressivity to capture complex epistatic interactions. We bridge this gap with CoSiNE, a continuous-time Markov chain parameterized by a deep neural network. Mathematically, we prove that CoSiNE provides a first-order approximation to the intractable sequential point mutation process, capturing epistatic effects with an error bound that is quadratic in branch length. Empirically, CoSiNE outperforms state-of-the-art language models in zero-shot variant effect prediction by explicitly disentangling selection from context-dependent somatic hypermutation. Finally, we introduce Guided Gillespie, a classifier-guided sampling scheme that steers CoSiNE at inference time, enabling efficient optimization of antibody binding affinity toward specific antigens.
title Conditionally Site-Independent Neural Evolution of Antibody Sequences
topic Machine Learning
Populations and Evolution
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18982