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arXiv · 2610.30180

QProtFuse: Query-Guided Layer Fusion for Retrieval-Augmented Protein Function Prediction

Mianzhi Pan·Peishuo Liu·Yawen Ouyang·Botian Wang·Yiming Rong·Hao Zhou·Jianbing Zhang
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Abstract

Predicting protein functions from amino acid sequences is essential to understanding biological processes. Large language models (LLMs) offer flexible function descriptions to natural-language queries, yet their limited protein understanding motivates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Existing protein RAG methods primarily expand external retrieval signals while overlooking the rich knowledge encoded within a single protein language model (PLM). We show that retrieval performance varies across PLM layers and biological tasks, making conventional final-layer selection suboptimal. To this end, we propose QProtFuse, which uses queries to adaptively fuse multi-layer protein features and jointly learns protein and annotation retrieval through intra-modal and cross-modal contrastive objectives. On Prot-Inst-OOD, QProtFuse achieves the best protein and annotation retrieval scores, reaching 16.4\% Recall@1 with annotation reranking. These gains improve downstream RAG-based function descriptions, yielding the highest LLM-as-a-judge scores for both Qwen3-8B (6.22/10) and DeepSeek-V4-Pro (6.68/10). Ablations and weight analyses demonstrate the value of query-guided fusion and complementary training objectives for exploiting a PLM's internal knowledge.

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Mianzhi Pan, Peishuo Liu, Yawen Ouyang, Botian Wang, Yiming Rong, Hao Zhou, Jianbing Zhang. 2026-10-19. QProtFuse: Query-Guided Layer Fusion for Retrieval-Augmented Protein Function Prediction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30180

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