Towards All-Atom Foundation Models for Biomolecular Binding Affinity Prediction

Liang Shi, Zuobai Zhang, Huiyu Cai, Santiago Miret, Zhi Yang, Jian Tang

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Biomolecular interactions play a critical role in biological processes. While recent breakthroughs like AlphaFold 3 have enabled accurate modeling of biomolecular complex structures, predicting binding affinity remains challenging mainly due to limited high-quality data. Recent methods are often specialized for specific types of biomolecular interactions, limiting their generalizability. In this work, we repurpose AlphaFold 3 for representation learning to predict binding affinity, a non-trivial task that requires shifting from generative structure prediction to encoding observed geometry, simplifying the heavily conditioned trunk module, and designing a framework to jointly capture sequence and structural information. To address these challenges, we introduce the Atom-level Diffusion Transformer (ADiT), which takes sequence and structure as inputs, employs a unified tokenization scheme, integrates diffusion transformers, and removes dependencies on multiple sequence alignments and templates. We pre-train three ADiT variants on the PDB dataset with a denoising objective and evaluate them across protein-ligand, drug-target, protein-protein, and antibody-antigen interactions. The model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance across benchmarks, scales effectively with model size, and successfully identifies wet-lab validated affinity-enhancing antibody mutations, establishing a generalizable framework for biomolecular interactions. Our open-source implementation is available at https://github.com/VectorShi/ADiT.