arXiv subjects

Aaron Solomon

Publications and source records attributed to Aaron Solomon.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Can agents reliably design therapeutic antibodies?

Recent work has demonstrated agents driving protein design workflows, either through orchestration of specialized tools or direct manipulation of sequences. Yet the fidelity with which agents follow protein design instructions and the factors contributing to their effectiveness remain understudied. We examine agentic antibody design under two settings: when explicit molecular-editing instructions are provided and when agents receive only previously-scored sequences and are prompted to propose improvements. We call the first task-guided and the second black-box design. For the task-guided setting, we curate ten expert-validated affinity-improvement tasks and show that LLM judges closely reproduce programmatic evaluations of instruction following. We then study two augmentations: access to antibody-relevant tools and to previously scored design history. Tools improve instruction following (IF) and sequence space exploration while reducing optimization performance, whereas design history reduces IF but improves optimization performance at the expense of exploration. Finally, we combine taskguided and black-box design within an in silico optimization loop and show that our agentic optimizer performs comparably to an established Bayesian optimization baseline.

q-bio.QM↗

arXiv2023

Inverse Protein Folding Using Deep Bayesian Optimization

Inverse protein folding -- the task of predicting a protein sequence from its backbone atom coordinates -- has surfaced as an important problem in the "top down", de novo design of proteins. Contemporary approaches have cast this problem as a conditional generative modelling problem, where a large generative model over protein sequences is conditioned on the backbone. While these generative models very rapidly produce promising sequences, independent draws from generative models may fail to produce sequences that reliably fold to the correct backbone. Furthermore, it is challenging to adapt pure generative approaches to other settings, e.g., when constraints exist. In this paper, we cast the problem of improving generated inverse folds as an optimization problem that we solve using recent advances in "deep" or "latent space" Bayesian optimization. Our approach consistently produces protein sequences with greatly reduced structural error to the target backbone structure as measured by TM score and RMSD while using fewer computational resources. Additionally, we demonstrate other advantages of an optimization-based approach to the problem, such as the ability to handle constraints.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2019

Spatio-Temporal Deep Graph Infomax

Spatio-temporal graphs such as traffic networks or gene regulatory systems present challenges for the existing deep learning methods due to the complexity of structural changes over time. To address these issues, we introduce Spatio-Temporal Deep Graph Infomax (STDGI)---a fully unsupervised node representation learning approach based on mutual information maximization that exploits both the temporal and spatial dynamics of the graph. Our model tackles the challenging task of node-level regression by training embeddings to maximize the mutual information between patches of the graph, at any given time step, and between features of the central nodes of patches, in the future. We demonstrate through experiments and qualitative studies that the learned representations can successfully encode relevant information about the input graph and improve the predictive performance of spatio-temporal auto-regressive forecasting models.

cs.LG↗