From Structure to Function: Preference Alignment for Function-aware Protein Inverse Folding

Abstract

Protein inverse folding models conditioned on structure achieve high sequence recovery but often fail to preserve biological function due to the lack of functional supervision. We propose a function-aware preference alignment framework that improves functional preservation by fine-tuning models to favor function-preserving sequences over function-disrupting alternatives, avoiding the need for explicit function optimization. Our approach constructs reliable preference pairs in silico using hypothesis-driven perturbations of critical residues and model-consistent likelihood constraints, enabling scalable supervision without additional wet-lab measurements. The resulting framework guides protein sequence design models toward generating sequences that better preserve functional integrity, while remaining compatible with existing inverse folding pipelines such as ProteinMPNN and ESM-IF. Extensive experiments on protein design benchmarks and enzyme datasets with established wet-lab validation show that our fine-tuned models consistently outperform pretrained counterparts in preserving functional integrity during protein sequence design. The code is available at https://github.com/EvaFlower/Function-aware-Protein-Inverse-Folding