EvoStruct

EvoStruct: Bridging Evolutionary and Structural Priors for Antibody CDR Design via Protein Language Model Adaptation

EvoStruct addresses vocabulary collapse in GNN-based antibody CDR design by combining a frozen protein language model with an E(3)-equivariant GNN through a cross-attention adapter. The method introduces progressive PLM unfreezing and R-Drop consistency regularization to recover functionally important amino acid diversity. On CHIMERA-Bench, EvoStruct improves sequence recovery by 16%, reduces perplexity by 43%, and achieves 2.3x greater amino acid diversity compared to the best GNN baselines.