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Debora Susan Marks

9 accepted papers

2026

Shrinking Proteins with Diffusion

ICLR 2026poster

Many proteins useful in modern medicine or bioengineering are challenging to make in the lab, fuse with other proteins in cells, or deliver to tissues in the body because their sequences are too long. Shortening these sequences typically involves costly, time-consuming experimental campaigns. Ideall…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Protriever: End-to-End Differentiable Protein Homology Search for Fitness Prediction

ICML 2025poster

Retrieving homologous protein sequences is essential for a broad range of protein modeling tasks such as fitness prediction, protein design, structure modeling, and protein-protein interactions. Traditional workflows have relied on a two-step process: first retrieving homologs via Multiple Sequence…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Kernel-Based Evaluation of Conditional Biological Sequence Models

ICML 2024poster

We propose a set of kernel-based tools to evaluate the designs and tune the hyperparameters of conditional sequence models, with a focus on problems in computational biology. The backbone of our tools is a new measure of discrepancy between the true conditional distribution and the model's estimate,…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multi-Scale Representation Learning for Protein Fitness Prediction

NeurIPS 2024poster

Designing novel functional proteins crucially depends on accurately modeling their fitness landscape. Given the limited availability of functional annotations from wet-lab experiments, previous methods have primarily relied on self-supervised models trained on vast, unlabeled protein sequence or str…

2023

ProteinGym: Large-Scale Benchmarks for Protein Fitness Prediction and Design

NeurIPS 2023poster

Predicting the effects of mutations in proteins is critical to many applications, from understanding genetic disease to designing novel proteins that can address our most pressing challenges in climate, agriculture and healthcare. Despite a surge in machine learning-based protein models to tackle th…

2023

ProteinNPT: Improving Protein Property Prediction and Design with Non-Parametric Transformers

NeurIPS 2023poster

Protein design holds immense potential for optimizing naturally occurring proteins, with broad applications in drug discovery, material design, and sustainability. However, computational methods for protein engineering are confronted with significant challenges, such as an expansive design space, s…

2022

Non-identifiability and the Blessings of Misspecification in Models of Molecular Fitness

NeurIPS 2022accept

Understanding the consequences of mutation for molecular fitness and function is a fundamental problem in biology. Recently, generative probabilistic models have emerged as a powerful tool for estimating fitness from evolutionary sequence data, with accuracy sufficient to predict both laboratory mea…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2021

A generative nonparametric Bayesian model for whole genomes

NeurIPS 2021poster

Generative probabilistic modeling of biological sequences has widespread existing and potential use across biology and biomedicine, particularly given advances in high-throughput sequencing, synthesis and editing. However, we still lack methods with nucleotide resolution that are tractable at the sc…