ALSA: Adversarial Learning of Supervised Attentions for Visual Question Answering

Protein-ligand binding affinity prediction with edge awareness and supervised attention

Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is crucial in structure-based drug design but remains some challenges even with recent advances in deep learning: (1) Existing methods neglect the edge information in protein and ligand structure data; (2) current attention mechanisms struggle to capture true binding interactions in the small dataset. Herein, we proposed SEGSA_DTA, a SuperEdge Graph convolution-based and Supervised Attention-based Drug-Target Affinity prediction method, where the super edge graph convolution can comprehensively utilize node and edge information and the multi-supervised attention module can efficiently learn the attention distribution consistent with real protein-ligand interactions. Results on the multiple datasets show that SEGSA_DTA outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. We also applied SEGSA_DTA in repurposing FDA-approved drugs to identify potential coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) treatments. Besides, by using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), we found that SEGSA_DTA is interpretable and further provides a new quantitative analytical solution for structure-based lead optimization.

Adversarial Learning with Bidirectional Attention for Visual Question Answering

In this paper, we provide external image features and use the internal attention mechanism to solve the VQA problem given a dataset of textual questions and related images. Most previous models for VQA use a pair of images and questions as input. In addition, the model adopts a question-oriented attention mechanism to extract the features of the entire image and then perform feature fusion. However, the shortcoming of these models is that they cannot effectively eliminate the irrelevant features of the image. In addition, the problem-oriented attention mechanism lacks in the mining of image features, which will bring in redundant image features. In this paper, we propose a VQA model based on adversarial learning and bidirectional attention. We exploit external image features that are not related to the question to form an adversarial mechanism to boost the accuracy of the model. Target detection is performed on the image-that is, the image-oriented attention mechanism. The bidirectional attention mechanism is conducive to promoting model attention and eliminating interference. Experimental results are evaluated on benchmark datasets, and our model performs better than other models based on attention methods. In addition, the qualitative results show the attention maps on the images and leads to predicting correct answers.