Abstract:Efficient encoding and representation of large 3D molecular structures with high fidelity is critical for biomolecular design applications. Despite this, many representation learning approaches restrict themselves to modeling smaller systems or use coarse-grained approximations of the systems, for example modeling proteins at the resolution of amino acid residues rather than at the level of individual atoms. To address this, we develop quantized auto-encoders that learn atom-level tokenizations of complete proteins, RNA and small molecule structures with reconstruction accuracies below and around 1 Angstrom. We demonstrate that the Mamba state space model architecture employed is comparatively efficient, requiring a fraction of the training data, parameters and compute needed to reach competitive accuracies and can scale to systems with almost 100,000 atoms. The learned structure tokens of bio2token may serve as the input for all-atom language models in the future.