Papers › ExplainableFold: Understanding AlphaFold Prediction with Explainable AI

ExplainableFold: Understanding AlphaFold Prediction with Explainable AI

27 Jan 2023arXiv:2301.11765archive 2025-07-28

Juntao Tan, Yongfeng Zhang

This paper presents ExplainableFold, an explainable AI framework for protein structure prediction. Despite the success of AI-based methods such as AlphaFold in this field, the underlying reasons for their predictions remain unclear due to the black-box nature of deep learning models. To address this, we propose a counterfactual learning framework inspired by biological principles to generate counterfactual explanations for protein structure prediction, enabling a dry-lab experimentation approach. Our experimental results demonstrate the ability of ExplainableFold to generate high-quality explanations for AlphaFold's predictions, providing near-experimental understanding of the effects of amino acids on 3D protein structure. This framework has the potential to facilitate a deeper understanding of protein structures.

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rutgerswiselab/ExplainableFold officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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PredictionProtein Structure Prediction

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AlphaFold

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