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A cross-attention transformer encoder for paired sequence data

Dens, C.; Laukens, K.; Meysman, P.; Bittremieux, W.

2023-12-12 bioinformatics
10.1101/2023.12.11.571066 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Transformer-based sequence encoding architectures are often limited to a single-sequence input while some tasks require a multi-sequence input. For example, the peptide-MHCII binding prediction task where the input consists of two protein sequences. Current workarounds to solve this input-type mismatch lack resemblance with the biological mechanisms behind the task. As a solution, we propose a novel cross-attention transformer encoder that creates a cross-attended embedding of both input sequences. We compare its classification performance on the peptide-MHCII binding prediction task to a baseline logistic regression model and a default transformer encoder. Finally, we make visualizations of the attention layers to show how the different models learn different patterns.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.