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Event Embedding of Protein Networks : Compositional Learning of Biological Function

Machine Learning 2026-04-02 v1

Abstract

In this work, we study whether enforcing strict compositional structure in sequence embeddings yields meaningful geometric organization when applied to protein-protein interaction networks. Using Event2Vec, an additive sequence embedding model, we train 64-dimensional representations on random walks from the human STRING interactome, and compare against a DeepWalk baseline based on Word2Vec, trained on the same walks. We find that compositional structure substantially improves pathway coherence (30.2×\times vs 2.9×\times above random), functional analogy accuracy (mean similarity 0.966 vs 0.650), and hierarchical pathway organization, while geometric properties such as norm--degree anticorrelation are shared with or exceeded by the non-compositional baseline. These results indicate that enforced compositionality specifically benefits relational and compositional reasoning tasks in biological networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.00911,
  title  = {Event Embedding of Protein Networks : Compositional Learning of Biological Function},
  author = {Antonin Sulc},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.00911},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Machine Learning for Genomics Explorations (MLGenX) ICLR 2026 Workshop