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Deep Batch Active Learning for Protein Structure Modeling

delete2026-01-01
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PRE
AI
Z
Zexin Xue
M
Michael Bailey
A
Abhinav Gupta
R
Ruijiang Li
A
Alejandro Corrochano-Navarro
S
Sizhen Li
L
Lorenzo Kogler-Anele
Q
Qui Bo Yu
W
Wander Van Breedam
N
Norbert Furtmann
J
Joseph D. Batchelor
K
Klotz, Luisa
S
Sven Jager *
DOI:10.1177/15578666251405823delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Molecular structure prediction is essential for understanding therapeutic functions and accelerating pharmaceutical research. While state-of-the-art deep learning models like AlphaFold demonstrate strong performance on general protein backbone prediction, they struggle with critical regions of VHH antibodies, a novel family of molecules underrepresented in current training datasets. Many academic and industry laboratories can generate high-quality VHH structures for novel sequences, presenting an opportunity to improve model performance through iterative fine-tuning with strategically selected new data. However, experimental structure determination requires weeks to months of effort and significant costs per structure, making exhaustive data collection impractical. Randomly curating subset of full collection yields suboptimal improvements, as many structures provide redundant information while key regions remain unexplored. Strategic data selection can identify which structures, once experimentally determined, will maximally improve prediction accuracy, enabling superior model performance with fewer iterations and lower costs. We propose DEWDROP, an active learning selection method that guides VHH structure curation to maximally improve fine-tuned model performance. DEWDROP leverages Monte Carlo dropout to generate prediction ensembles that inform optimal data selection. While we focus on VHH antibodies, underrepresentation issues affect many molecular domains, making DEWDROP broadly applicable as a model-agnostic method for structural biology applications. To demonstrate this effectiveness, we evaluate our approach through retrospective iterative fine-tuning experiments and batch selection analysis on two distinct structural families: VHH antibodies from SAbDab-nano as our target application and primary benchmark and Mycobacterium leprae proteins from the AlphaFold Protein Database to demonstrate broader applicability across different molecular domains. For all analyses, we use a structured prediction model based on coarse-grain molecular representations that operates independently of multiple sequence alignments called Equifold. We demonstrate that DEWDROP (1) improves model training efficiency through optimized batch selection, outperforming baseline methods and (2) selects structurally informative data with high information content.
Keywords:
active learning for regression
protein structure prediction
batch optimization

Journal

J
Journal of Computational Biology
IF:
1.6
Papers:
55
Citations:
5.1K

Organization

S
sanofi usa
Scholars:
2.0K
Papers: 1.4K
Citations: 1
A
astrazeneca
Scholars:
3.2K
Papers: 854
Citations: 172
S
Sanofi-Aventis
Scholars:
9.8K
Papers: 6.0K
Citations: 35
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Cited Papers

Cited Papers

Active Learning with Statistical Models
err1996-03-01
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errOAAI
errD. A. Cohn; Z. Ghahramani; M. I. Jordan
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EquiFold: Protein Structure Prediction with a Novel Coarse-Grained Structure Representation
err
IF0
err2022-10-08
err0
errOAAI
errJae Hyeon Lee; Payman Yadollahpour; Andrew Watkins; Nathan C. Frey; Andrew Leaver-Fay; Stephen Ra; Kyunghyun Cho; Vladimir Gligorijević; Aviv Regev; Richard Bonneau
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Exploring chemical and conformational spaces by batch mode deep active learning
err2022-01-01
err20
errOAAI
errZaverkin, Viktor; Holzmueller, David; Steinwart, Ingo; Kaestner, Johannes
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A survey of transfer learning
err2016-05-28
err0
errOAAI
errKarl Weiss; Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar; DingDing Wang
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Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
err2021-07-15
err0
errOAAI
errJohn Jumper; Richard Evans; Alexander Pritzel; Tim Green; Michael Figurnov; Olaf Ronneberger; Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool; Russ Bates; Augustin Žídek; Anna Potapenko; Alex Bridgland; Clemens Meyer; Simon A. A. Kohl; Andrew J. Ballard; Andrew Cowie; Bernardino Romera-Paredes; Stanislav Nikolov; Rishub Jain; Jonas Adler; Trevor Back; Stig Petersen; David Reiman; Ellen Clancy; Michal Zielinski; Martin Steinegger; Michalina Pacholska; Tamas Berghammer; Sebastian Bodenstein; David Silver; Oriol Vinyals; Andrew W. Senior; Koray Kavukcuoglu; Pushmeet Kohli; Demis Hassabis
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Transfer Learning for Drug Discovery
err2020-07-16
err204
PREAI
errCai, Chenjing; Wang, Shiwei; Xu, Youjun; Zhang, Weilin; Tang, Ke; Ouyang, Qi; Lai, Luhua; Pei, Jianfeng
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Optimizing active learning for free energy calculations
err2022-12-01
err0
PREAI
errJames Thompson; W Patrick Walters; Jianwen A Feng; Nicolas A Pabon; Hongcheng Xu; Michael Maser; Brian B Goldman; Demetri Moustakas; Molly Schmidt; Forrest York
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Computational approaches streamlining drug discovery
err2023-04-26
err0
errOAAI
errAnastasiia V. Sadybekov; Vsevolod Katritch
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SAbDab in the age of biotherapeutics: updates including SAbDab-nano, the nanobody structure tracker
err2021-11-19
err54
errOAAI
errSchneider, Constantin; Raybould, Matthew I. J.; Deane, Charlotte M.
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