AF2Dock

Preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.28.691195

Installation

First, install openfold following instructions on this page. Current repo is tested with this version of openfold.

(Notes from Jan 2026: I needed to remove flash-attn from the environment.yml file to successfully set up the enviroment.)

Then, in the enviroment with openfold, install AF2Dock as follows:

git clone https://github.com/Graylab/AF2Dock.git
cd AF2Dock
pip install .

If you run into issue installing fastpdb (required by pinder), follow instructions on the pinderrepo page to download the rust toolchain.

To use cuEquivariance, install additional packages as follows at the end:

pip install cuequivariance_ops_torch_cu12 cuequivariance_torch

(Notes from Jan 2026: Currently, triangle_multiplicative_updates from cuEquivariance does not work out of the box. It gives me error on typing, as pytorch 2.5 does not seem to support using list for typing. I needed to manually patch the triangle_multiplicative_update.py and attention_pair_bias_torch.py files in cuequivariance_ops_torch by replacing list typing with List and add from typing import List at the start of the files for it to work. Related issue.)

Inference

Model weights are uploaded to Zenodo. They can be downloaded with the scripts/download_weights.py script as follows:

python scripts/download_weights.py --model-name AF2Dock_base

Run prediction with a single set of input structures:

python predict.py \
output_dir \
--rec_struc_path path/to/receptor/structure \
--lig_struc_path path/to/ligand/structure \
--num_samples 40 \
--num_steps 10 \
--checkpoint_path path/to/model/weights

Or supply the input as a csv file (example in data/example_input):

python predict.py \
output_dir \
--input_csv path/to/csv/file \
--num_samples 40 \
--num_steps 10 \
--checkpoint_path path/to/model/weights

When using input strucutures that have missing residues, an a3m file containing the alignment of resolved residues with the full sequence for each chain is required as an input. And example is available as data/example_input/ab_8tbq_1_r_pred_wo_cdrh3.a3m.

Code for computing success rates and bootstrapping are available as jupyter notebooks in notebooks. To run tests on the PINDER-AF2 benchmark, first cache the ESM embeddings using scripts/compute_pinder_ESM_embeddings.py and then run scripts/test_pinder.py. To run predictions and tests with single-sequence AF-M, use scripts/predict_afm.py and scripts/test_pinder_afm.py.

Training

To train using the PINDER training set, first cache the ESM embeddings using scripts/compute_pinder_ESM_embeddings.py and obtain the three-body interactions using scripts/find_train_three_body_interactions.py.

Then train as follows (training from scratch in this case):

python train.py \
output_dir \
--cached_esm_embedding_folder path/to/cached/esm \
--pinder_entity_seq_cluster_pkl data/pinder_entity_seq_cluster.pkl \
--three_body_interactions_pkl path/to/three/body/results \
--resume_from_jax_params path/to/afm/weights \
--af_params freeze \
--list_of_samples_to_exclude data/train_samples_to_exclude.txt \
--gpus 4 \
--num_nodes 1 \
--precision bf16 \
--max_epochs 100 \
--log_every_n_steps 8 \
--accumulate_grad_batches 16 \
--val_check_interval 0.1 \
--limit_val_batches 0.15 \
--num_sanity_val_steps 2 \

Certain settings such as the percentages of holo/apo/predicted structures need to be specified in a json file with the --experiment_config_json argument. For instance, use the following json file for completely holo inputs:

{
"data.train.pinder_cate_prob.holo": 1.0,
"data.train.pinder_cate_prob.apo": 0.0,
"data.train.pinder_cate_prob.pred": 0.0
}