Coarse composition suffices: tabular in-context learning for multi-activity antimicrobial peptide profiling

arXiv:2608.30337v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) often act against multiple pathogen classes, making multi-label activity prediction a more realistic screening target than binary antimicrobial classification. The ESCAPE benchmark formalizes this setting, but leading approaches typically rely on multimodal, structure-conditioned deep models that are costly to train and tune. We show that a simple, sequence-only pipeline can match and surpass these methods by combining 330 interpretable sequence descriptors with TabPFN, a tabular foundation model that performs in-context prediction in a single forward pass without gradient-based training or hyperparameter search. On ESCAPE (82,359 peptides; five labels), a label-powerset TabPFN model achieves mAP-5 = 77.8%, improving on the previously best reported 72.1%. A probabilistic classifier chain is the first method to match or exceed the best published average precision on each of the five labels simultaneously. The gains persist under the prior state-of-the-art single-fold training protocol, indicating they are not a training-set-size artefact, and are largest for remote homologues (+11.2 points below 30% sequence identity). Ablations further show that predicted structure is unnecessary at inference and that performance is not driven by any single descriptor family: ten global physicochemical scalars recover 91% of full-feature performance. Finally, explicitly modelling label dependence yields targeted benefits for scarce activities and supports ranking which activity to assay next from partial positive evidence.

Related

• AMPBench-MT: A Homology-Controlled Benchmark for Antimicrobial Peptide Potency, Spectrum, and Safety Prediction
• TabH2O: A Unified Foundation Model for Tabular Prediction
• TabDPT-Turbo: Efficient In-Context Learning for Tabular Prediction

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-09-01