Deciphering key factors of active learning performance in biomolecular design

Employing machine learning (ML) to efficiently design biomolecules has become an emerging trend in genetic engineering. Active learning (AL) algorithms, as scalable approaches for ML-guided discovery, can automatically identify promising samples for function (i.e. fitness) optimization, and have therefore attracted growing interest across scientific domains. However, applying AL in genetic engineering presents several challenges. The regulatory patterns between sequence and fitness are highly complex, noisy, and sparse, making the existing evaluation of AL algorithm efficiency unreliable. Therefore, a comprehensive benchmark and thorough investigation into the key determinants of AL performance are urgently required to resolve these challenges.

We created a benchmark across multiple large-scale libraries of proteins and DNA regulatory sequences, evaluating uncertainty quantification (UQ) algorithms on metrics including calibration and accuracy, demonstrating the robustness and generality of ensemble-based algorithms. Moreover, we systematically assessed the efficiency of existing sampling strategies for fitness optimization. Our results show that no single sampling strategy is universally optimal across datasets, although greedy iterative strategies perform well in many practical scenarios. Finally, we evaluated the factors influencing optimization efficiency, and found that optimization efficiency is mainly determined by the choice of initial settings, distribution sparsity, and sequence similarity in high-fitness regions, rather than by the specific AL algorithm. Based on this, we proposed two quantifiable metrics to interpret the strategy performance and provide a practical reference for strategy selection. These findings offer valuable insights for the implementation of AL pipelines in biomolecular sequence design scenarios.

The source code and supporting datasets used in this work are openly available on GitHub at https://github.com/WangLabTHU/biomolecule-al-decipher and have been archived on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19661002.