ProtAff

Protein binding affinity prediction with ESM2 + LoRA cross-attention.

Convention: lower predicted affinity = stronger binder (natural Kd scale).

Pretrained model

The recommended checkpoint for general use is weights/model_margin_weighted/ (LoRA adapter trained with weighted margin ranking on log-affinity pairs).

weights/model_margin_weighted/
├── adapter_config.json # PEFT/LoRA config
├── adapter_model.safetensors # LoRA weights
├── tokenizer_config.json # ESM2 tokenizer
├── special_tokens_map.json
├── vocab.txt
└── best_model_metadata.txt

Installation

git clone https://github.com/Graylab/ProtAff.git
cd ProtAff

Pick one of the following install paths.

Option 1 — pip (recommended for inference, ~2 min, ~3 GB):

python3.11 -m venv .venv &&source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Option 2 — conda (minimal, equivalent to option 1):

conda env create -f environment.yml # creates env named "protaff"
conda activate protaff

Option 3 — full training/analysis env (lightning, wandb, anarci, foldseek, biotite, …): conda env create -f environment-full.yml. Only needed if you plan to retrain or run the analysis scripts.

Minimum requirements for inference: Python ≥ 3.10, PyTorch ≥ 2.1, transformers, peft, safetensors, omegaconf, pandas, tqdm, pyyaml. A GPU is strongly recommended; CPU inference works but is slow (~1 s/sequence on CPU with ESM2-650M).

The first run downloads facebook/esm2_t33_650M_UR50D (~2.5 GB) from HuggingFace Hub.

Quick start — run inference

src/predict.py is a standalone script (no Hydra) that loads the LoRA adapter on top of ESM2 and writes per-row predictions.

1. Prepare an input CSV

Your CSV needs a binder column and a target column. Accepted names:

Column	Accepted headers
binder	binder_sequence, binder_seq, binder, seq_1, heavy_chain, cdr3
target	target_sequence, target_seq, target, seq_2, antigen

Example inputs.csv:

id,binder_sequence,target_sequencebinder_A,EVQLVQSGAEVKK...,LEEKKVCQGTSNK...binder_B,EVKLEESGGGLVQ...,LEEKKVCQGTSNK...

2. Run prediction

python src/predict.py \
--model_dir weights/model_margin_weighted \
--input_csv inputs.csv \
--output_csv predictions.csv

The output is your input CSV with one extra column, predicted_affinity (lower = stronger binder).

3. Common options

Apply the same target to every row (skip the target column in the CSV):

python src/predict.py \
--model_dir weights/model_margin_weighted \
--input_csv binders_only.csv \
--output_csv predictions.csv \
--target_seq MKWVTFISLLFLFSSAYS...

Tune throughput / memory:

python src/predict.py \
--model_dir weights/model_margin_weighted \
--input_csv inputs.csv \
--output_csv predictions.csv \
--batch_size 16 \
--num_workers 4

Flag	Default	Notes
--model_dir	—	Path to the LoRA adapter folder.
--input_csv	—	Input CSV with binder (and optional target) columns.
--output_csv	—	Where to write predictions.
--batch_size	32	Lower if you hit OOM.
--num_workers	0	DataLoader workers.
--target_seq	None	Apply one target sequence to all rows.
--max_length	1024	Token cap per chain (binder and target each).

End-to-end example

# 1. Activate environmentsource .venv/bin/activate # or: conda activate protaff# 2. Predict on the bundled NIV test set
python src/predict.py \
--model_dir weights/model_margin_weighted \
--input_csv data/test/test_niv.csv \
--output_csv predictions_niv.csv
# 3. Rank: lowest predicted_affinity = strongest binder
python -c "import pandas as pd; \df = pd.read_csv('predictions_niv.csv'); \print(df.nsmallest(5, 'predicted_affinity')[['id','predicted_affinity']])"

Interpreting the score

predicted_affinity is in normalized log-Kd units (lower = stronger). The model was trained with a pairwise margin loss, so absolute values are only meaningful as a ranking: compare scores across binders for the same target rather than treating any single value as a calibrated Kd.

Troubleshooting

• OSError: ... adapter_model.safetensors not found — point --model_dir at the folder that contains adapter_config.json, not at any single file.
• CUDA OOM — drop --batch_size (try 8 or 4) or run on CPU. Sequences are truncated to max_length=1024 tokens per chain.
• Could not find binder column in CSV — rename your column to one of the accepted headers above.
• First run is slow — the ESM2-650M backbone (~2.5 GB) is downloaded once and cached under ~/.cache/huggingface/.

Citation

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.13.732058v1