2025/02/07 by Zhicong Wang, Wang, Zhicong, Zicheng Ma +8 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Biomolecules (q-bio.BM) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.06846
openalex publication_date 2025/02/07 · openalex created_date 2025/02/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Motivation: Proteins are of great significance in living organisms. However, understanding their functions encounters numerous challenges, such as insufficient integration of multimodal information, a large number of training parameters, limited flexibility of classification-based methods, and the lack of systematic evaluation metrics for protein Q&A systems. To tackle these issues, we propose the Prot2Chat framework. Results: We modified ProteinMPNN to encode protein sequence and structural information in a unified way. We used a large language model (LLM) to encode questions into vectors and developed a protein-text adapter to compress protein information into virtual tokens based on these vectors, achieving the early fusion of text and protein information. Finally, the same LLM reads the virtual tokens and the questions to generate answers. To optimize training efficiency, we froze the encoder and employed Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) techniques for the LLM. Experiments on two datasets show that both automated metrics and expert evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our model, and zero-shot prediction results highlight its generalization ability. The models and codes are available at https://github.com/ wangzc1233/Prot2Chat. Contact: [email protected] or [email protected] Key words: Protein Q&A, Early-Fusion, LLM