In plain words: Current protein-text benchmarks leak answers and use language scores that miss biology, so the data was rebuilt and judged by biological entities instead. A retrieval approach that looks up similar proteins beat language models trained on protein data at writing protein descriptions, without any training.
Abstract · Rethinking Text-based Protein Understanding: Retrieval or LLM?
In recent years, protein-text models have gained significant attention for their potential in protein generation and understanding. Current approaches focus on integrating protein-related knowledge into large language models through continued pretraining and multi-modal alignment, enabling simultaneous comprehension of textual descriptions and protein sequences. Through a thorough analysis of existing model architectures and text-based protein understanding benchmarks, we identify significant data leakage issues present in current benchmarks. Moreover, conventional metrics derived from natural language processing fail to accurately assess the model's performance in this domain. To address these limitations, we reorganize existing datasets and introduce a novel evaluation framework based on biological entities. Motivated by our observation, we propose a retrieval-enhanced method, which significantly outperforms fine-tuned LLMs for protein-to-text generation and shows accuracy and efficiency in training-free scenarios. Our code and data can be seen at https://github.com/IDEA-XL/RAPM.
Juntong Wu, Zijing Liu, He Cao, Hao Li, Bin Feng, Zishan Shu, Ke Yu, Li Yuan, Yu Li
arXiv:2505.20354 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted May 26, 2025 · updated Nov 10, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2025 (EMNLP 2025) Main Conference