Shan Chang

Cheng Ge, Han-Shen Tae, Zhenqiang Zhang et al.

Target-specific peptides, such as conotoxins, exhibit exceptional binding affinity and selectivity toward ion channels and receptors. However, their therapeutic potential remains underutilized due to the limited diversity of natural variants and the labor-intensive nature of traditional optimization strategies. Here, we present CreoPep, a deep learning-based conditional generative framework that integrates masked language modeling with a progressive masking scheme to design high-affinity peptide mutants while uncovering novel structural motifs. CreoPep employs an integrative augmentation pipeline, combining FoldX-based energy screening with temperature-controlled multinomial sampling, to generate structurally and functionally diverse peptides that retain key pharmacological properties. We validate this approach by designing conotoxin inhibitors targeting the $α$7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, achieving submicromolar potency in electrophysiological assays. Structural analysis reveals that CreoPep-generated variants engage in both conserved and novel binding modes, including disulfide-deficient forms, thus expanding beyond conventional design paradigms. Overall, CreoPep offers a robust and generalizable platform that bridges computational peptide design with experimental validation, accelerating the discovery of next-generation peptide therapeutics.

Yunzhe Li, Facheng Hu, Hongzi Zhu et al.

Inertial measurement units (IMUs), have been prevalently used in a wide range of mobile perception applications such as activity recognition and user authentication, where a large amount of labelled data are normally required to train a satisfactory model. However, it is difficult to label micro-activities in massive IMU data due to the hardness of understanding raw IMU data and the lack of ground truth. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-grained user perception approach, called Saga, which only needs a small amount of labelled IMU data to achieve stunning user perception accuracy. The core idea of Saga is to first pre-train a backbone feature extraction model, utilizing the rich semantic information of different levels embedded in the massive unlabelled IMU data. Meanwhile, for a specific downstream user perception application, Bayesian Optimization is employed to determine the optimal weights for pre-training tasks involving different semantic levels. We implement Saga on five typical mobile phones and evaluate Saga on three typical tasks on three IMU datasets. Results show that when only using about 100 training samples per class, Saga can achieve over 90% accuracy of the full-fledged model trained on over ten thousands training samples with no additional system overhead.