English

Pseudodata-guided Invariant Representation Learning Boosts the Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Enzymatic Kinetic Parameter Prediction

Machine Learning 2026-01-13 v1 Artificial Intelligence Quantitative Methods

Abstract

Accurate prediction of enzyme kinetic parameters is essential for understanding catalytic mechanisms and guiding enzyme engineering.However, existing deep learning-based enzyme-substrate interaction (ESI) predictors often exhibit performance degradation on sequence-divergent, out-of-distribution (OOD) cases, limiting robustness under biologically relevant perturbations.We propose O2^2DENet, a lightweight, plug-and-play module that enhances OOD generalization via biologically and chemically informed perturbation augmentation and invariant representation learning.O2^2DENet introduces enzyme-substrate perturbations and enforces consistency between original and augmented enzyme-substrate-pair representations to encourage invariance to distributional shifts.When integrated with representative ESI models, O2^2DENet consistently improves predictive performance for both kcatk_{cat} and KmK_m across stringent sequence-identity-based OOD benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results among the evaluated methods in terms of accuracy and robustness metrics.Overall, O2^2DENet provides a general and effective strategy to enhance the stability and deployability of data-driven enzyme kinetics predictors for real-world enzyme engineering applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.07261,
  title  = {Pseudodata-guided Invariant Representation Learning Boosts the Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Enzymatic Kinetic Parameter Prediction},
  author = {Haomin Wu and Zhiwei Nie and Hongyu Zhang and Zhixiang Ren},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.07261},
  year   = {2026}
}