arXiv subjects

Nadeem Taj

Publications and source records attributed to Nadeem Taj.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ConTact: Contact-First Antibody CDR Design via Explicit Interface Reasoning

Computational antibody CDR design methods condition on antigen structure to generate binding loops. Yet, the existing architectures conflate two fundamentally distinct sub-problems: identifying which CDR positions will contact the antigen, and selecting amino acids at those positions. This forces models to learn contact reasoning implicitly through uniform message passing, diluting antigen signal across all positions equally. We introduce ConTact, a contact-then-act architecture that explicitly decomposes CDR design into three cascaded stages: learning surface complementarity fingerprints, predicting CDR-antigen contacts, and injecting contact-gated antigen features into the prediction head. A distance-biased cross-attention module encodes geometric priors favoring spatial neighbors, a contact-weighted cross-entropy loss concentrates gradient signal on binding-critical positions, and a standoff-aware contact-recovery loss places the designed loop against its native epitope. On the ChiMERa-Bench dataset, ConTact surpasses the baselines on the binding interface and structural metrics (backbone RMSD, fraction of native contacts, interface RMSD, DockQ, and epitope F1) on all three splits, improving native-contact recovery by 11 to 16%, while matching the best sequence recovery. The source code is available at: https://github.com/mansoor181/ConTact.git

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

CHIMERA-Bench: A Benchmark Dataset for Epitope-Specific Antibody Design

Computational antibody design has seen rapid methodological progress, with dozens of deep generative methods proposed in the past three years, yet the field lacks a standardized benchmark for fair comparison and model development. These methods are evaluated on different SAbDab snapshots, non-overlapping test sets, and incompatible metrics, and the literature fragments the design problem into numerous sub-tasks with no common definition. We introduce CHIMERA-Bench: (CDR Modeling with Epitope-guided Redesign), a unified benchmark built around a single canonical task: epitope-conditioned CDR sequence-structure co-design. CHIMERA-Bench provides three components. The first is a curated, deduplicated dataset of 2,922 antibody-antigen complexes with epitope and paratope annotations. The second is a set of three biologically motivated splits that test generalization to unseen epitopes, unseen antigen folds, and prospective temporal targets. The third is a comprehensive evaluation protocol with five metric groups, including novel epitope-specificity measures. We benchmark eleven methods spanning six generative paradigms and report results across all splits. CHIMERA-Bench is the largest dataset of its kind for the antibody design problem, allowing the community to develop and test novel methods and evaluate their generalizability.

cs.LG↗