Abstract
Antibody-specific epitope prediction aims to identify which antigen residues are recognized by a given antibody, a task that depends on the three-dimensional complementarity between antibody CDRs and the antigen surface. Existing methods usually leverage PLM embeddings and inject structure through additional graph, surface, or point-cloud encoders, where the positional mechanism inside attention remains largely tied to one-dimensional sequence order. For proteins, the analogue of a token offset is not only sequence separation, but also the three-dimensional displacement between residues after folding. This raises a question, can folded residue geometry serve as the positional mechanism of attention itself? We propose Local-Frame Rotary Attention (LFRA), which expresses inter-residue displacements in backbone-defined local frames and injects them directly into rotary attention. This design preserves continuous directional geometry while ensuring invariance to independent $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ transformations. The code and dataset are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01092
