GBPNet: Universal Geometric Representation Learning on Protein Structures

Representation learning of protein 3D structures is challenging and essential for applications, e.g., computational protein design or protein engineering. Recently, geometric deep learning has achieved great success in non-Euclidean domains. Although protein can be represented as a graph naturally, it remains under-explored mainly due to the significant challenges in modeling the complex representations and capturing the inherent correlation in the 3D structure modeling. Several challenges include: 1) It is challenging to extract and preserve multi-level rotation and translation equivariant information during learning. 2) Difficulty in developing appropriate tools to effectively leverage the input spatial representations to capture complex geometries across the spatial dimension. 3) Difficulty in incorporating various geometric features and preserving the inherent structural relations. In this work, we introduce geometric bottleneck perceptron, and a general SO(3)-equivariant message passing neural network built on top of it for protein structure representation learning. The proposed geometric bottleneck perceptron can be incorporated into diverse network architecture backbones to process geometric data in different domains. This research shed new light on geometric deep learning in 3D structure studies. Empirically, we demonstrate the strength of our proposed approach on three core downstream tasks, where our model achieves significant improvements and outperforms existing benchmarks. The implementation is available at https://github.com/sarpaykent/GBPNet.