ProtSent: Protein Sentence Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ofer, Dan, Perets, Oriel, Linial, Michal, Rappoport, Nadav
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Ofer, Dan
Perets, Oriel
Linial, Michal
Rappoport, Nadav
author_facet Ofer, Dan
Perets, Oriel
Linial, Michal
Rappoport, Nadav
contents Protein language models (pLMs) produce per-residue representations that capture evolutionary and structural information, yet their mean-pooled sequence embeddings are not explicitly trained to reflect functional, evolutionary or structural similarity between proteins. We present Protein Sentence Transformers (ProtSent), a contrastive fine-tuning framework for adapting PLMs into general-purpose embedding models. ProtSent trains with MultipleNegativesRankingLoss across five protein-pair datasets: Pfam families, structurally derived hard negatives, AlphaFold DB structural pairs, and StringDB protein--protein interactions, and Deep Mutational Scanning data. We evaluate on 23~downstream tasks using frozen embeddings with a k-nearest-neighbor probe to measure embedding neighborhood quality. On ESM-2 150M, ProtSent improves 15 of 23 tasks, with gains of +105% on remote homology detection, +17% on variant effect prediction, and +19.9% Recall@1 on SCOPe-40 structural retrieval. The 35M variant improves 16 of 23 tasks with +40.5% on remote homology and +15.5% Recall@1 on SCOPe-40. Contrastive fine-tuning restructures the embedding space to better capture protein function and structure, without any task-specific supervision. We release the models, public data, and training recipe and code.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06830
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ProtSent: Protein Sentence Transformers
Ofer, Dan
Perets, Oriel
Linial, Michal
Rappoport, Nadav
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
I.2
Protein language models (pLMs) produce per-residue representations that capture evolutionary and structural information, yet their mean-pooled sequence embeddings are not explicitly trained to reflect functional, evolutionary or structural similarity between proteins. We present Protein Sentence Transformers (ProtSent), a contrastive fine-tuning framework for adapting PLMs into general-purpose embedding models. ProtSent trains with MultipleNegativesRankingLoss across five protein-pair datasets: Pfam families, structurally derived hard negatives, AlphaFold DB structural pairs, and StringDB protein--protein interactions, and Deep Mutational Scanning data. We evaluate on 23~downstream tasks using frozen embeddings with a k-nearest-neighbor probe to measure embedding neighborhood quality. On ESM-2 150M, ProtSent improves 15 of 23 tasks, with gains of +105% on remote homology detection, +17% on variant effect prediction, and +19.9% Recall@1 on SCOPe-40 structural retrieval. The 35M variant improves 16 of 23 tasks with +40.5% on remote homology and +15.5% Recall@1 on SCOPe-40. Contrastive fine-tuning restructures the embedding space to better capture protein function and structure, without any task-specific supervision. We release the models, public data, and training recipe and code.
title ProtSent: Protein Sentence Transformers
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
I.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06830