4.1LGSep 27, 2025Code
ABConformer: Physics-inspired Sliding Attention for Antibody-Antigen Interface PredictionZhang-Yu You, Jiahao Ma, Hongzong Li et al.
Accurate prediction of antibody-antigen (Ab-Ag) interfaces is critical for vaccine design, immunodiagnostics, and therapeutic antibody development. However, achieving reliable predictions from sequences alone remains a challenge. In this paper, we present ABCONFORMER, a model based on the Conformer backbone that captures both local and global features of a biosequence. To accurately capture Ab-Ag interactions, we introduced the physics-inspired sliding attention, enabling residue-level contact recovery without relying on three-dimensional structural data. ABConformer can accurately predict paratopes and epitopes given the antibody and antigen sequence, and predict pan-epitopes on the antigen without antibody information. In comparison experiments, ABCONFORMER achieves state-of-the-art performance on a recent SARS-CoV-2 Ab-Ag dataset, and surpasses widely used sequence-based methods for antibody-agnostic epitope prediction. Ablation studies further quantify the contribution of each component, demonstrating that, compared to conventional cross-attention, sliding attention significantly enhances the precision of epitope prediction. To facilitate reproducibility, we will release the code under an open-source license upon acceptance.
4.1LGSep 8, 2025
CAME-AB: Cross-Modality Attention with Mixture-of-Experts for Antibody Binding Site PredictionHongzong Li, Jiahao Ma, Zhanpeng Shi et al.
Antibody binding site prediction plays a pivotal role in computational immunology and therapeutic antibody design. Existing sequence or structure methods rely on single-view features and fail to identify antibody-specific binding sites on the antigens. In this paper, we propose \textbf{CAME-AB}, a novel Cross-modality Attention framework with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) backbone for robust antibody binding site prediction. CAME-AB integrates five biologically grounded modalities, including raw amino acid encodings, BLOSUM substitution profiles, pretrained language model embeddings, structure-aware features, and GCN-refined biochemical graphs, into a unified multimodal representation. To enhance adaptive cross-modal reasoning, we propose an \emph{adaptive modality fusion} module that learns to dynamically weight each modality based on its global relevance and input-specific contribution. A Transformer encoder combined with an MoE module further promotes feature specialization and capacity expansion. We additionally incorporate a supervised contrastive learning objective to explicitly shape the latent space geometry, encouraging intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. To improve optimization stability and generalization, we apply stochastic weight averaging during training. Extensive experiments on benchmark antibody-antigen datasets demonstrate that CAME-AB consistently outperforms strong baselines on multiple metrics, including Precision, Recall, F1-score, AUC-ROC, and MCC. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each architectural component and the benefit of multimodal feature integration. The model implementation details and the codes are available on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CAME-AB-C525