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Nathan C. Frey

4 accepted papers

2025

Concept Bottleneck Language Models For Protein Design

ICLR 2025poster

We introduce Concept Bottleneck Protein Language Models (CB-pLM), a generative masked language model with a layer where each neuron corresponds to an interpretable concept. Our architecture offers three key benefits: i) Control: We can intervene on concept values to precisely control the properties…

2025

Generalists vs. Specialists: Evaluating LLMs on Highly-Constrained Biophysical Sequence Optimization Tasks

ICML 2025poster

Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in biomolecule optimization problems, they incur heavy computational costs and struggle to satisfy precise constraints. On the other hand, specialized solvers like LaMBO-2 offer efficiency and fine-grained control but require more domain exper…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling

ICLR 2024oral

We resolve difficulties in training and sampling from a discrete generative model by learning a smoothed energy function, sampling from the smoothed data manifold with Langevin Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), and projecting back to the true data manifold with one-step denoising. Our $\textit{Discre…

2023

Protein Design with Guided Discrete Diffusion

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

A popular approach to protein design is to combine a generative model with a discriminative model for conditional sampling. The generative model samples plausible sequences while the discriminative model guides a search for sequences with high fitness. Given its broad success in conditional sampling…