Tokenized and continuous embedding compressions of protein sequence and structure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Existing protein machine learning representations typically model either the sequence or structure distribution, with the other modality implicit. Here, we characterize an embedding of the joint distribution of protein sequence and structure by compressing the latent space of the protein folding model ESMFold. This provides mechanistic interpretability insights, as well as a flexible compressed representation. We term these CHEAP (compressed hourglass embedding adaptations of proteins) embeddings. In continuous compression schemes, the ESMFold latent space can be reduced by factors of 128 × along the channel and 8 × along the length while retaining structure information at <2 Å scale accuracy and performing competitively on protein function and localization benchmarks. In discrete compression schemes, we construct a tokenized all-atom structure vocabulary that retains high reconstruction accuracy, thus introducing a tokenized representation of an all-atom structure that can be obtained from the sequence alone. CHEAP democratizes representations captured by large models and can enable flexible downstream applications such as generation, search, and prediction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".