Chamaileon: Cross-Context Binder Design with Contextualized Modeling and Mixed Sampling
Abstract
The rapid evolution of generative models has unlocked new potentials in protein binder design, a pivotal task in structural biology, by facilitating end-to-end generation via joint sequence-structure modeling or hallucination. However, existing approaches are predominantly implemented under a single-target, single-state assumption, limiting their ability to model multi-target or multi-state interactions required for advanced function-oriented protein design. Here, we introduce Chamaileon, which unifies multi-target and multi-state binder design by formulating the problem as cross-context binding landscape modeling. The framework is underpinned by a training paradigm termed In-Context Complex Co-Design (I3CD) for context-aware sequence-structure co-modeling. During inference, we employ Mixture-of-Paths Sampling (MoPS), a scalable strategy that optimizes a single sequence across contexts while alleviating the scarcity of high-quality multi-conformational paired data. Extensive evaluation on our newly constructed benchmark, CROSS, demonstrates that Chamaileon effectively generates sequences adaptable to diverse conformational landscapes and multi-target requirements. The code is available on https://github.com/caohengyuan/Chamaileon.
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Most protein binder design methods assume a single target in a single structural state, while many real-world applications require one sequence to function across multiple conformations or targets. We introduce Chamaileon, a unified framework for cross-context binder design. Chamaileon combines In-Context Complex Co-Design (I3CD) for context-aware sequence-structure modeling with Mixture-of-Paths Sampling (MoPS), which iteratively optimizes a shared sequence across multiple structural contexts at inference time. We also introduce CROSS, a benchmark covering both multi-state and multi-target binder design. Our results show that Chamaileon can generate a single binder sequence that adapts its structure to satisfy distinct binding contexts, opening a path toward programmable multi-specific binders and conformational modulators. Code is available at https://github.com/caohengyuan/Chamaileon.
good paper!
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