Muhammed Tekin

Cold-Start Protein–Protein Interaction Prediction Is Bounded by the Frozen Embedding, Not the Classifier: A Leakage-Controlled Audit and a Calibrated Conformal Baseline

A many-objective NSGA-III search is built that attaches a compact head to a frozen ESM-2 t33 backbone and jointly optimizes the head architecture, a physicochemical feature mask, and a contrastive-pretraining curriculum against a fitness vector that explicitly contains the cold-start gap, and adds distribution-free calibrated selective prediction via split conformal, turning a frozen-ESM classifier into a deployable cold-start predictor with finite-sample coverage.