A Corporative Language Model for Protein–Protein Interaction, Binding Affinity, and Interface Contact Prediction

Understanding protein–protein interactions (PPIs) is crucial for deciphering cellular processes and guiding therapeutic discovery. While recent protein language models have advanced sequence-based protein representation, most are designed for individual chains and fail to capture inherent PPI patterns. We introduce a novel Protein–Protein Language Model (PPLM) that jointly encodes interacting protein pair representations. Building on this foundation, we develop three specialized predictors—PPLM-PPI, PPLM-Affinity, and PPLM-Contact—targeting binary interaction, binding affinity, and interface contact predictions, respectively. Large-scale experiments show that PPLM-PPI achieves state-of-the-art performance across different species on binary interaction prediction, while PPLM-Affinity outperforms both ESM2 and structure-based methods on binding affinity modeling, particularly on challenging cases including antibody–antigen and TCR–pMHC complexes. PPLM-Contact further surpasses existing PPI contact predictors on inter-protein contact prediction and interface residue recognition, including those deduced from cutting-edge complex structure predictions. Together, these results highlight the potential of co-represented language models to advance computational modeling of PPIs.