Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning

Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Lin Zheng, Jiayi Xin, Qintong Li, Lijun Wu, Zhihong Deng, Yang Lu, Qi Liu, Sheng Wang, Lingpeng Kong


Abstract
Protein Language Models traditionally depend on Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSA) to incorporate evolutionary knowledge. However, MSA-based approaches suffer from substantial computational overhead and generally underperform in generalizing to de novo proteins. This study reevaluates the role of MSA, proposing it as a retrieval augmentation method and questioning the necessity of sequence alignment. We show that a simple alternative, Retrieved Sequence Augmentation (RSA), can enhance protein representation learning without the need for alignment and cumbersome preprocessing. RSA surpasses MSA Transformer by an average of 5% in both structural and property prediction tasks while being 373 times faster. Additionally, RSA demonstrates enhanced transferability for predicting de novo proteins. This methodology addresses a critical need for efficiency in protein prediction and can be rapidly employed to identify homologous sequences, improve representation learning, and enhance the capacity of Large Language Models to interpret protein structures.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.104
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1738–1767
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.104
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Lin Zheng, Jiayi Xin, Qintong Li, Lijun Wu, Zhihong Deng, Yang Lu, Qi Liu, Sheng Wang, and Lingpeng Kong. 2024. Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1738–1767, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning (Ma et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.104.pdf