Learning the Interaction Prior for Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction: A Model-Agnostic Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gao, Ziqi, Zi, Chenyi, Liu, Zijing, Meng, Ziqiao, Li, Yu, Li, Jia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Gao, Ziqi
Zi, Chenyi
Liu, Zijing
Meng, Ziqiao
Li, Yu
Li, Jia
author_facet Gao, Ziqi
Zi, Chenyi
Liu, Zijing
Meng, Ziqiao
Li, Yu
Li, Jia
contents Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental to cellular function and disease mechanisms. Current learning-based PPI predictors focus on learning powerful protein representations but neglect designing specialized classification heads. They mainly rely on generic aggregating methods like concatenation or dot products, which lack biological insight. Motivated by the biological "L3 rule", where multiple length-3 paths between a pair of proteins indicate their interaction likelihood, our study addresses this gap by designing a biologically informed PPI classifier. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that popular PPI datasets strongly support the L3 rule. We propose an L3-path-regularized graph prompt learning method called L3-PPI, which can generate a prompt graph with virtual L3 paths based on protein representations and controls the number of paths. L3-PPI reformulates the classification of protein embedding pairs into a graph-level classification task over the generated prompt graph. This lightweight module seamlessly integrates with PPI predictors as a plug-and-play component, injecting the interaction prior of complementarity to enhance performance. Extensive experiments show that L3-PPI achieves superior performance enhancements over advanced competitors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09964
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning the Interaction Prior for Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction: A Model-Agnostic Approach
Gao, Ziqi
Zi, Chenyi
Liu, Zijing
Meng, Ziqiao
Li, Yu
Li, Jia
Artificial Intelligence
Quantitative Methods
Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental to cellular function and disease mechanisms. Current learning-based PPI predictors focus on learning powerful protein representations but neglect designing specialized classification heads. They mainly rely on generic aggregating methods like concatenation or dot products, which lack biological insight. Motivated by the biological "L3 rule", where multiple length-3 paths between a pair of proteins indicate their interaction likelihood, our study addresses this gap by designing a biologically informed PPI classifier. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that popular PPI datasets strongly support the L3 rule. We propose an L3-path-regularized graph prompt learning method called L3-PPI, which can generate a prompt graph with virtual L3 paths based on protein representations and controls the number of paths. L3-PPI reformulates the classification of protein embedding pairs into a graph-level classification task over the generated prompt graph. This lightweight module seamlessly integrates with PPI predictors as a plug-and-play component, injecting the interaction prior of complementarity to enhance performance. Extensive experiments show that L3-PPI achieves superior performance enhancements over advanced competitors.
title Learning the Interaction Prior for Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction: A Model-Agnostic Approach
topic Artificial Intelligence
Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09964