Accurately Predicting Protein Mutational Effects via a Hierarchical Many-Body Attention Network

Dahao Xu, Jiahua Rao, Mingming Zhu, Jixian Zhang, Wei Lu, Shuangjia Zheng, Yuedong Yang

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Predicting changes in binding free energy ($\Delta\Delta G$) is essential for understanding protein-protein interactions, which are critical in drug design and protein engineering. However, existing methods often rely on pre-trained knowledge and heuristic features, limiting their ability to accurately model complex mutation effects, particularly higher-order and many-body interactions. To address these challenges, we propose H3-DDG, a Hypergraph-driven Hierarchical network to capture Higher-order many-body interactions across multiple scales. By introducing a hierarchical communication mechanism, H3-DDG effectively models both local and global mutational effects. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. On the SKEMPI v2 dataset, H3-DDG achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.75, improving multi-point mutations prediction by 12.10%. On the challenging BindingGYM dataset, it outperforms Prompt-DDG and BA-DDG by 62.61% and 34.26%, respectively. Ablation and efficiency analyses demonstrate its robustness and scalability, while a case study on SARS-CoV-2 antibodies highlights its practical value in improving binding affinity for therapeutic design.