PSLL: Persistent Sheaf Laplacian Learning for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction
Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity remains a central challenge in computational drug discovery due to the complex interplay among molecular geometry, physicochemical interactions, and atom-specific charge information. In this work, we introduce a Persistent Sheaf Laplacian learning (PSLL) framework for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction. The proposed approach constructs multiscale topological representations from three-dimensional protein-ligand complexes by incorporating atomic partial charges into sheaf restriction maps over Vietoris-Rips and alpha complex filtrations. To capture chemically diverse protein-ligand interactions, we introduce element-specific and category-specific atom-pair representations within the PSLL framework. Harmonic and non-harmonic spectra extracted from the resulting persistent sheaf Laplacians are used as molecular descriptors. To complement the PSLL-derived molecular representation, we incorporate transformer-based protein embeddings and SMILES-derived ligand descriptors for binding affinity prediction. The scoring power of the proposed multiscale PSLL model is validated against existing state-of-the-art methods on three widely used PDBbind benchmark datasets, including PDBbind-v2007, PDBbind-v2013, and PDBbind-v2016. The computational results indicate that the proposed PSLL model achieves strong predictive performance across benchmark datasets, highlighting its potential as an interpretable and mathematically grounded framework with promising generalizability for molecular machine learning and drug discovery.