RePaRank: An Efficient Architecture for Antibody-Antigen Interface Prediction by Proximity Ranking
The prediction of protein-protein interactions is central to structural biology, yet leading models are often computationally expensive, creating an accessibility gap for many high-throughput applications. Furthermore, common evaluation metrics such as binary contact prediction can be unreliable. In this work, we address both challenges. We introduce RePaRank, a computationally efficient deep learning architecture with 39.4 million parameters that predicts antibody-antigen interfaces by reframing the problem as a proximity ranking task in a learned embedding space. We also propose the Precision AUC, a robust, ranking-based metric that provides a more stable assessment of model performance than traditional binary methods. Our experiments show that RePaRank consistently outperforms benchmark models in paratope prediction and is highly competitive in epitope prediction among models that do not require external resources such as Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSA). RePaRank offers a practical and powerful tool for the immunoinformatics community.