ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training

Le Zhuo, Zewen Chi, Minghao Xu, Heyan Huang, Jianan Zhao, Heqi Zheng, Conghui He, Xian-Ling Mao, Wentao Zhang


Abstract
We propose ProtLLM, a versatile cross-modal large language model (LLM) for both protein-centric and protein-language tasks. ProtLLM features a unique dynamic protein mounting mechanism, enabling it to handle complex inputs where the natural language text is interspersed with an arbitrary number of proteins. Besides, we propose the protein-as-word language modeling approach to train ProtLLM. By developing a specialized protein vocabulary, we equip the model with the capability to predict not just natural language but also proteins from a vast pool of candidates. Additionally, we construct a large-scale interleaved protein-text dataset, named InterPT, for pre-training. This dataset comprehensively encompasses both (1) structured data sources like protein annotations and (2) unstructured data sources like biological research papers, thereby endowing ProtLLM with crucial knowledge for understanding proteins. We evaluate ProtLLM on classic supervised protein-centric tasks and explore its novel protein-language applications. Experimental results demonstrate that ProtLLM not only achieves superior performance against protein-specialized baselines on protein-centric tasks but also induces zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities on protein-language tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.484
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8950–8963
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.484
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.484
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Le Zhuo, Zewen Chi, Minghao Xu, Heyan Huang, Jianan Zhao, Heqi Zheng, Conghui He, Xian-Ling Mao, and Wentao Zhang. 2024. ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8950–8963, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training (Zhuo et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.484.pdf