Adapting Boltz-2 with limited experimental activity data improves early enrichment in virtual screening

arXiv:2609.24302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Virtual screening aims to prioritize active compounds from large chemical libraries within a limited experimental budget. When applying Boltz-2 to virtual screening, a key challenge is how to use limited experimental data from the target assay to improve the prioritization of active compounds. We investigated whether fine-tuning the Boltz-2 affinity heads with a small number of binary activity labels could improve early enrichment of active compounds in hit discovery. We compared fine-tuning with 40-300 labels in a retrospective evaluation on eight MF-PCBA targets. With 300 activity measurements, fine-tuning increased the number of actives in the top 1% by a geometric mean of 1.77-fold across the eight targets and improved average precision (AP) by 2.14-fold relative to the control without fine-tuning. We also investigated whether rescoring a subset of candidates could retain the improvement in hit recovery by reranking only the top-ranked Boltz-2 candidates with the fine-tuned head. Restricting rescoring to approximately 10% of the evaluation set retained hit recovery comparable to full rescoring. These findings show that affinity-head fine-tuning with limited activity labels improves early enrichment with Boltz-2 and that this benefit can be retained when rescoring a restricted set of candidates.

Abstract:Virtual screening aims to prioritize active compounds from large chemical libraries within a limited experimental budget. When applying Boltz-2 to virtual screening, a key challenge is how to use limited experimental data from the target assay to improve the prioritization of active compounds. We investigated whether fine-tuning the Boltz-2 affinity heads with a small number of binary activity labels could improve early enrichment of active compounds in hit discovery. We compared fine-tuning with 40-300 labels in a retrospective evaluation on eight MF-PCBA targets. With 300 activity measurements, fine-tuning increased the number of actives in the top 1% by a geometric mean of 1.77-fold across the eight targets and improved average precision (AP) by 2.14-fold relative to the control without fine-tuning. We also investigated whether rescoring a subset of candidates could retain the improvement in hit recovery by reranking only the top-ranked Boltz-2 candidates with the fine-tuned head. Restricting rescoring to approximately 10% of the evaluation set retained hit recovery comparable to full rescoring. These findings show that affinity-head fine-tuning with limited activity labels improves early enrichment with Boltz-2 and that this benefit can be retained when rescoring a restricted set of candidates.

Biomolecules (q-bio.BM); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)

arXiv:2609.24302 [q-bio.BM]

(or arXiv:2609.24302v1 [q-bio.BM] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.24302 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Adapting Boltz-2 with limited experimental activity data improves early enrichment in virtual screening

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