ICML 2025

ADIOS: Antibody Development via Opponent Shaping
Sebastian Towers * 1 2 Aleksandra Kalisz * 1 2 Philippe A. Robert 3 Alicia Higueruelo 4 Francesca Vianello 5
Ming-Han Chloe Tsai 6 Harrison Steel 2 Jakob Foerster 1 2
Abstract
Anti-viral therapies are typically designed to tar-
get only the current strains of a virus, a my-
opic response. However, therapy-induced selec-
tive pressures drive the emergence of new viral
strains, against which the original myopic ther-
apies are no longer effective.
This evolution-
ary response presents an opportunity: our ther-
apies could both defend against and actively influ-
ence viral evolution. This motivates our method
ADIOS: Antibody Development vIa Opponent
Shaping. ADIOS is a meta-learning framework
where the process of antibody therapy design, the
outer loop, accounts for the virus’s adaptive re-
sponse, the inner loop. With ADIOS, antibodies
are not only robust against potential future vari-
ants, they also influence, i.e., shape, which fu-
ture variants emerge. In line with the opponent
shaping literature, we refer to our optimised an-
tibodies as shapers. To demonstrate the value of
ADIOS, we build a viral evolution simulator us-
ing the Absolut! framework, in which shapers
successfully target both current and future viral
variants, outperforming myopic antibodies. Fur-
thermore, we show that shapers modify the dis-
tribution over viral evolutionary trajectories to
result in weaker variants. We believe that our
ADIOS paradigm will facilitate the discovery of
long-lived vaccines and antibody therapies while
also generalising to other domains. Specifically,
domains such as antimicrobial resistance, cancer
treatment, and others with evolutionarily adap-
tive opponents. Our code is available at https:
//github.com/olakalisz/adios.
*Equal contribution
1FLAIR, Foerster Lab for AI Research
2Department of Engineering, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
3Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel, Basel, Switzer-
land 4Isomorphic ...