# Anti-virus Autobots: Predicting More Infectious Virus Variants for Pandemic Prevention through Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14854 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14854/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01412/) (2020)
- [When Vision Transformers Outperform ResNets without Pre-training or Strong Data Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01548/) (2021)
- [Protein Folding Neural Networks Are Not Robust](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04460/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

More infectious virus variants can arise from rapid mutations in their proteins, creating new infection waves. These variants can evade one's immune system and infect vaccinated individuals, lowering vaccine efficacy. Hence, to improve vaccine design, this project proposes Optimus PPIme - a deep learning approach to predict future, more infectious variants from an existing virus (exemplified by SARS-CoV-2). The approach comprises an algorithm which acts as a "virus" attacking a host cell. To increase infectivity, the "virus" mutates to bind better to the host's receptor. 2 algorithms were attempted - greedy search and beam search. The strength of this variant-host binding was then assessed by a transformer network we developed, with a high accuracy of 90%. With both components, beam search eventually proposed more infectious variants. Therefore, this approach can potentially enable researchers to develop vaccines that provide protection against future infectious variants before they emerge, pre-empting outbreaks and saving lives.