DualEquiNet RNA Benchmarks

Junjie Xu, Jiahao Zhang, M. Prakash, Xiang Zhang, Suhang Wang

Main figure for DualEquiNet RNA Benchmarks

Abstract

Geometric graph neural networks (GNNs) that respect E(3) symmetries have achieved strong performance on small molecule modeling, but they face scalability and expressiveness challenges when applied to large biomolecules such as RNA and proteins. These systems require models that can simultaneously capture fine-grained atomic interactions, long-range dependencies across spatially distant components, and biologically relevant hierarchical structure—such as atoms forming residues, which in turn form higher-order domains. Existing geometric GNNs, which typically operate exclusively in either Euclidean or Spherical Harmonics space, are limited in their ability to capture both the fine-scale atomic details and the long-range, symmetry-aware dependencies required for modeling the multi-scale structure of large biomolecules. We introduce DualEquiNet, a Dual-Space Hierarchical Equivariant Network that constructs complementary representations in both Euclidean and Spherical Harmonics spaces to capture local geometry and global symmetry-aware features. DualEquiNet employs bidirectional cross-space message passing and a novel Cross-Space Interaction Pooling mechanism to hierarchically aggregate atomic features into biologically meaningful units, such as residues, enabling efficient and expressive multi-scale modeling for large biomolecular systems. DualEquiNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple existing benchmarks for RNA property prediction and protein modeling, and outperforms prior methods on two newly introduced 3D structural benchmarks demonstrating its broad effectiveness across a range of large biomolecule modeling tasks.

Proposed method: DualEquiNet

Benchmark Results

Tested on 1 dataset 2 baseline values reported too low

Tables show presented results in global context (best 3 papers + GCN + MLP).

DualEquiNet RNA Benchmarks

#ModelRMSE ↓Paper
1
G-Heyna
0.5480 ±0.0080
2
Equiformer
0.5500 ±0.0090
3
G-Transformer
0.5540 ±0.0030
6
DualEquiNet
0.6360 ±0.0490
This paper
7
SchNet
actual #7 vs paper #13 6 places worse
0.6910 ±0.0180
best reported
actual #7 vs paper #13 6 places worse
paper 0.7370 ±0.0020
paper 0.7370 ±0.0020 Δ at pub 0.0460
8
TFN
actual #8 vs paper #8
0.6940 ±0.0080
actual #8 vs paper #8
paper 0.6940 ±0.0080

Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted.

paper 0.6940 ±0.0080 Δ at pub 0.0160
9
FastEGNN
actual #9 vs paper #12 3 places worse
0.7040 ±0.0050
best reported
actual #9 vs paper #12 3 places worse
paper 0.7310 ±0.0060
paper 0.7310 ±0.0060 Δ at pub 0.0270
10
GotenNet
0.7180 ±0.0020
This paper
11
EGNN
actual #11 vs paper #11
0.7200 ±0.0220
actual #11 vs paper #11
paper 0.7200 ±0.0220

Improvement within reported uncertainty; not highlighted.

paper 0.7200 ±0.0220 Δ at pub 0.0080
12
HEGNN
0.7290 ±0.0070
This paper
13
GVPGNN
0.7360 ±0.0030
This paper
SOTA performance (not significantly different from the best) Proposed method (this paper) Baseline / comparison (this paper) Global context (other papers) Best at pub — reported result worse than the best known when published (best reported in green)