Table 2 We first examine representation smoothness with respect to fitness and sequence using amino acid sequence directly, labeled as Sequence’ in Table 2. As expected, this representation possesses the highest smoothness with respect to sequence however it’s smoothness with respect to fitness is less than that of other approaches. This likely due to the often tangled relationship between mutational distance and fitness desribed in Section 2.2. Furthermore, models which have trained to predict fitness produce a smoother representation with res pect to fitness than models trained solely on reconstruction. The smoothing effect of the fitness prediction task can be readily observed in Figure 4, where latent encodings from four models are visualized using principle component analysis (PCA) and PHATE Moon et al. [2017]. With the ablations performed in ReLSO, it is observed that removal of the interpolation sampling regularization (ReLSO (neg)) reduces the smoothness with respect to sequence, This effect is also observed in Figure 5 w variation in sequence change when the interpolation sam here walks in latent space possess greater pling regularization is removed. Lastly, we also compare to the protein representations learned by the pre-trained TAPE transformer model from Rao et al. [2019] which was trained on Pfam El-Gebali et al. [2019]. Table 2: Quantification of latent space ruggedness, described in Section 5.1 in Table 2. Ruggedness values with respect to fitness (Ay) and sequence (A;). The average of those two values \ = (A + A;)/2 is also reported.