Enhancing Reinforcement learning in 3-Dimensional Hydrophobic-Polar Protein Folding Model with Attention-based layers

Transformer-based architectures have recently propelled advances in sequence modeling across domains, but their application to the hydrophobic-hydrophilic (H-P) model for protein folding remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we adapt a Deep Q-Network (DQN) integrated with attention mechanisms (Transformers) to address the 3D H-P protein folding problem. Our system formulates folding decisions as a self-avoiding walk in a reinforced environment, and employs a specialized reward function based on favorable hydrophobic interactions. To improve performance, the method incorporates validity check including symmetry-breaking constraints, dueling and double Q-learning, and prioritized replay to focus learning on critical transitions. Experimental evaluations on standard benchmark sequences demonstrate that our approach achieves several known best solutions for shorter sequences, and obtains near-optimal results for longer chains. This study underscores the promise of attention-based reinforcement learning for protein folding, and created a prototype of Transformer-based Q-network structure for 3-dimensional lattice models.

@article{liu2025_2504.15634,
  title={ Enhancing Reinforcement learning in 3-Dimensional Hydrophobic-Polar Protein Folding Model with Attention-based layers },
  author={ Peizheng Liu and Hitoshi Iba },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.15634},
  year={ 2025 }
}