The DOI matches its Crossref record; 64 of the 64 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Evaluating Protein Transfer Learning with TAPE
Open accessAbstract
Protein modeling is an increasingly popular area of machine learning research. Semi-supervised learning has emerged as an important paradigm in protein modeling due to the high cost of acquiring supervised protein labels, but the current literature is fragmented when it comes to datasets and standardized evaluation techniques. To facilitate progress in this field, we introduce the Tasks Assessing Protein Embeddings (TAPE), a set of five biologically relevant semi-supervised learning tasks spread across different domains of protein biology. We curate tasks into specific training, validation, and test splits to ensure that each task tests biologically relevant generalization that transfers to real-life scenarios. We bench-mark a range of approaches to semi-supervised protein representation learning, which span recent work as well as canonical sequence learning techniques. We find that self-supervised pretraining is helpful for almost all models on all tasks, more than doubling performance in some cases. Despite this increase, in several cases features learned by self-supervised pretraining still lag behind features extracted by state-of-the-art non-neural techniques. This gap in performance suggests a huge opportunity for innovative architecture design and improved modeling paradigms that better capture the signal in biological sequences. TAPE will help the machine learning community focus effort on scientifically relevant problems. Toward this end, all data and code used to run these experiments are available at https://github.com/songlab-cal/tape .
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“They also learn summary representations, powerful features that can be used to better capture sequence relationships and link sequence to function via transfer learning 27,28,32-35.”
From Learning the protein language: Evolution, structure, and function (2021) · cites this paper as [33]
In the citing paper
“Since then, various language model-based protein embedding methods have been applied to these and other protein prediction problems through transfer learning, including protein phenotype prediction 28,32-34, residue-residue contact prediction 32,70, fold recognition 33, protein-protein 71,72 and protein-drug interaction prediction 35,73.”
From Learning the protein language: Evolution, structure, and function (2021) · cites this paper as [33]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L., & Polosukhin, I. (2017) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1706.03762 · Cited by 120,404
Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997) · Neural Computation · doi:10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735 · Cited by 102,318
Basic local alignment search tool
Altschul, S. F., Gish, W., Miller, W., Myers, E. W., & Lipman, D. J. (1990) · Journal of Molecular Biology · doi:10.1006/jmbi.1990.9999 · Cited by 98,669
Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs
Altschul, S. (1997) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/25.17.3389 · Cited by 73,302
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1810.04805 · Cited by 73,173
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/n19-1423 · Cited by 54,325
Berman, H. M. (2000) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/28.1.235 · Cited by 40,196
Deep Contextualized Word Representations
Peters, M., Neumann, M., Iyyer, M., Gardner, M., Clark, C., Lee, K., & Zettlemoyer, L. (2018) · Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/n18-1202 · Cited by 11,983
Identification of common molecular subsequences
Smith, T. F., & Waterman, M. S. (1981) · Journal of Molecular Biology · doi:10.1016/0022-2836(81)90087-5 · Cited by 9,962
UniProt: a worldwide hub of protein knowledge
The UniProt Consortium (2019) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gky1049 · Cited by 7,698
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- 2018, Association for Computational Linguistics, 1, 2227
- 2019, Language models are unsupervised multitask learners, OpenAI Blog, 1, 8
- 2017, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 30, 5998
- Tianqi Chen , Bing Xu , Chiyuan Zhang , and Carlos Guestrin . Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Cost. arXiv, 2016.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Evolutionary-scale prediction of atomic level protein structure with a language model
Lin, Z., Akin, H., Rao, R., Hie, B., Zhu, Z., Lu, W., Smetanin, N., Verkuil, R., Kabeli, O., Shmueli, Y., et al. (2022) · doi:10.1101/2022.07.20.500902 · Cited by 5,990
Self-citationRives, A., Meier, J., Sercu, T., Goyal, S., Lin, Z., Liu, J., Guo, D., Ott, M., Zitnick, C. L., Ma, J., et al. (2021) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2016239118 · Cited by 3,286
ProtTrans: Toward Understanding the Language of Life Through Self-Supervised Learning
Elnaggar, A., Heinzinger, M., Dallago, C., Rehawi, G., Wang, Y., Jones, L., Gibbs, T., Feher, T., Angerer, C., Steinegger, M., et al. (2022) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/tpami.2021.3095381 · Cited by 2,329
A guide to machine learning for biologists
Greener, J. G., Kandathil, S. M., Moffat, L., & Jones, D. T. (2022) · Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology · doi:10.1038/s41580-021-00407-0 · Cited by 2,127
Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families
Madani, A., Krause, B., Greene, E. R., Subramanian, S., Mohr, B. P., Holton, J. M., Olmos, J. L., Xiong, C., Sun, Z. Z., Socher, R., et al. (2023) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/s41587-022-01618-2 · Cited by 1,078
Metadata
- Authors
- Rao, R., Bhattacharya, N., Thomas, N., Duan, Y., Chen, X., Canny, J., Abbeel, P., & Song, Y. S.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Google (United States) (US)
- Corresponding author
- Rao, Roshan
- Bhattacharya, Nicholas
- Thomas, Neil
- Song, Yun S.
- ORCID
- Venue
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
- Publisher
- openRxiv
- Published
- 2019-06-20
- OpenAlex
- W2951433247
- Cited by
- 719
- References
- 62
- Citations by year
- 2026: 55 · 2025: 114 · 2024: 150 · 2023: 148 · 2022: 118 · 2021: 100 · 2020: 31 · 2019: 3
- Type
- posted content
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- Open Philanthropy Project
- National Institutes of Health
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
- Keywords
- protein representation learning, semi-supervised learning, protein embeddings, transfer learning, self-supervised pre-training, benchmark dataset, protein structure prediction, protein function prediction, sequence learning
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review