Paper List
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STAR-GO: Improving Protein Function Prediction by Learning to Hierarchically Integrate Ontology-Informed Semantic Embeddings
This paper addresses the core challenge of generalizing protein function prediction to unseen or newly introduced Gene Ontology (GO) terms by overcomi...
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Incorporating indel channels into average-case analysis of seed-chain-extend
This paper addresses the core pain point of bridging the theoretical gap for the widely used seed-chain-extend heuristic by providing the first rigoro...
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Competition, stability, and functionality in excitatory-inhibitory neural circuits
This paper addresses the core challenge of extending interpretable energy-based frameworks to biologically realistic asymmetric neural networks, where...
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Enhancing Clinical Note Generation with ICD-10, Clinical Ontology Knowledge Graphs, and Chain-of-Thought Prompting Using GPT-4
This paper addresses the core challenge of generating accurate and clinically relevant patient notes from sparse inputs (ICD codes and basic demograph...
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Hypothesis-Based Particle Detection for Accurate Nanoparticle Counting and Digital Diagnostics
This paper addresses the core challenge of achieving accurate, interpretable, and training-free nanoparticle counting in digital diagnostic assays, wh...
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MCP-AI: Protocol-Driven Intelligence Framework for Autonomous Reasoning in Healthcare
This paper addresses the critical gap in healthcare AI systems that lack contextual reasoning, long-term state management, and verifiable workflows by...
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Model Gateway: Model Management Platform for Model-Driven Drug Discovery
This paper addresses the critical bottleneck of fragmented, ad-hoc model management in pharmaceutical research by providing a centralized, scalable ML...
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Tree Thinking in the Genomic Era: Unifying Models Across Cells, Populations, and Species
This paper addresses the fragmentation of tree-based inference methods across biological scales by identifying shared algorithmic principles and stati...
Consistent Synthetic Sequences Unlock Structural Diversity in Fully Atomistic De Novo Protein Design
NVIDIA | Mila - Quebec AI Institute | Université de Montréal | HEC Montréal | CIFAR AI Chair
The 30-Second View
IN SHORT: This paper addresses the core pain point of low sequence-structure alignment in existing synthetic datasets (e.g., AFDB), which severely limits the performance of fully atomistic protein generative models.
Innovation (TL;DR)
- Methodology Introduces a novel high-quality synthetic dataset (D_SYN-ours, ~0.46M samples) by leveraging ProteinMPNN for sequence generation and ESMFold for refolding, ensuring aligned and recoverable sequence-structure pairs.
- Methodology Proposes Proteína-Atomística, a unified multi-modal flow-based framework that jointly models the distribution of Cα backbone atoms, discrete amino acid sequences, and non-Cα side-chain atoms in explicit observable space without latent variables.
- Biology Demonstrates that consistent synthetic sequences are critical for unlocking structural diversity, with retrained La-Proteína achieving +54% structural diversity and +27% co-designability, and Proteína-Atomística achieving +73% structural diversity and +5% co-designability.
Key conclusions
- Only 19.1% of the Foldseek-clustered AFDB dataset (D_AFDB-clstr) meets the standard 2Å all-atom RMSD co-designability threshold when refolded with ESMFold, revealing severe sequence-structure misalignment.
- Training on the new aligned dataset D_SYN-ours boosts La-Proteína's performance by +54% in structural diversity and +27% in co-designability, setting a new state-of-the-art.
- The proposed Proteína-Atomística framework, when trained on D_SYN-ours, shows a dramatic +73% improvement in structural diversity and a +5% improvement in co-designability, validating the dataset's broad utility.
Abstract: High-quality training datasets are crucial for the development of effective protein design models, but existing synthetic datasets often include unfavorable sequence-structure pairs, impairing generative model performance. We leverage ProteinMPNN, whose sequences are experimentally favorable as well as amenable to folding, together with structure prediction models to align high-quality synthetic structures with recoverable synthetic sequences. In that way, we create a new dataset designed specifically for training expressive, fully atomistic protein generators. By retraining La-Proteína, which models discrete residue type and side chain structure in a continuous latent space, on this dataset, we achieve new state-of-the-art results, with improvements of +54% in structural diversity and +27% in co-designability. To validate the broad utility of our approach, we further introduce Proteína-Atomística, a unified flow-based framework that jointly learns the distribution of protein backbone structure, discrete sequences, and atomistic side chains without latent variables. We again find that training on our new sequence-structure data dramatically boosts benchmark performance, improving Proteína-Atomística’s structural diversity by +73% and co-designability by +5%. Our work highlights the critical importance of aligned sequence-structure data for training high-performance de novo protein design models. All data will be publicly released.