CIR-DDG: backbone-agnostic residual correction of antibody-antigen affinity changes with explicit cross-chain geometry

Abstract

Motivation: Accurate prediction of mutation-induced protein--protein binding free-energy changes is important for antibody affinity maturation, yet scarce labels and complex interface geometry limit generalization. Heterogeneous predictors may process three-dimensional complexes without preserving the cross-chain signals most relevant to a mutation in their final scalar output. Results: We introduce CIR-DDG, a lightweight residual adapter that combines a fixed base prediction with 22 interpretable descriptors of cross-chain distance, contact density and site--partner context. In complex-level five-fold evaluation on SKEMPI 2.0 measurements from 343 complexes, CIR-DDG improved all six tested backbones on antibody--antigen interface mutations: Spearman correlation increased by 0.0346--0.1296, while RMSE decreased by 0.0074--0.0408\kcalmol. Cross-validated probing, equal-capacity controls and feature ablations support the complementarity of explicit geometry. On an independent SARS-CoV-2 RBD--ACE2 deep-mutational-scan benchmark of 3669 substitutions, the fold-specific adapters transferred without any retraining: the absolute interface Spearman correlation increased by 0.026--0.081 for all four evaluable backbones, showing that the learned geometric correction generalizes beyond SKEMPI thermodynamic measurements. Availability and implementation: CIR-DDG is available at https://github.com/ecnuabmlab/CIR-ddG.