GRAPE: graph-regularized protein language modeling unlocks TCR-epitope binding specificity.

Abstract

T-cell receptor (TCR)-epitope binding prediction is critical for immunotherapies but remains challenged by sparse interaction networks and severe class imbalance in training data. Current graph neural network (GNN) approaches for predicting TCR-epitope binding (TEB) fail to address two key limitations: over-smoothing during message propagation in sparse TCR-epitope graphs and biased predictions toward dominant epitope-TCR pairs. Here, we present GRAPE (Graph-Regularized Attentive Protein Embeddings), a framework unifying spectral graph regularization and imbalance-aware learning. GRAPE first leverages protein language models (ESM-2) to generate evolutionary-informed TCR/epitope embeddings, constructing a topology-aware interaction graph. To mitigate over-smoothing, we introduce spectral graph regularization, explicitly constraining node feature smoothness to preserve discriminative patterns in sparse neighborhoods. Simultaneously, a dynamic edge reweighting module prioritizes unobserved TCR-epitope edges during graph propagation, coupled with a differentiable area under the ROC curve-maximization objective that directly optimizes for imbalance resilience. Extensive benchmarking on public datasets demonstrates that GRAPE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in TEB prediction. This work establishes GRAPE as a robust framework for elucidating TCR-epitope interactions, with broad applications in immunology research and therapeutic design.