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 molecular dynamic


JAMUN: Bridging Smoothed Molecular Dynamics and Score-Based Learning for Conformational Ensembles

Neural Information Processing Systems

Conformational ensembles of protein structures are immensely important both for understanding protein function and drug discovery in novel modalities such as cryptic pockets. Current techniques for sampling ensembles such as molecular dynamics (MD) are computationally inefficient, while many recent machine learning methods do not transfer to systems outside their training data. We propose JAMUN which performs MD in a smoothed, noised space of all-atom 3D conformations of molecules by utilizing the framework of walk-jump sampling. JAMUN enables ensemble generation for small peptides at rates of an order of magnitude faster than traditional molecular dynamics. The physical priors in JAMUN enables transferability to systems outside of its training data, even to peptides that are longer than those originally trained on.


Learning 3D Anisotropic Noise Distributions Improves Molecular Force Fields

Neural Information Processing Systems

Coordinate denoising has emerged as a promising method for 3D molecular pretraining due to its theoretical connection to learning molecular force field. However, existing denoising methods rely on oversimplied molecular dynamics that assume atomic motions to be isotropic and homoscedastic. To address these limitations, we propose a novel denoising framework AniDS: Anisotropic Variational Autoencoder for 3D Molecular Denoising. AniDS introduces a structure-aware anisotropic noise generator that can produce atom-specific, full covariance matrices for Gaussian noise distributions to better reflect directional and structural variability in molecular systems. These covariances are derived from pairwise atomic interactions as anisotropic corrections to an isotropic base. Our design ensures that the resulting covariance matrices are symmetric, positive semi-definite, and SO(3)-equivariant, while providing greater capacity to model complex molecular dynamics. Extensive experiments show that AniDS outperforms prior isotropic and homoscedastic denoising models and other leading methods on the MD17 and OC22 benchmarks, achieving average relative improvements of 8.9% and 6.2% in force prediction accuracy. Our case study on a crystal and molecule structure shows that AniDS adaptively suppresses noise along the bonding direction, consistent with physicochemical principles.


Effective Dynamics and Transition Pathways from Koopman-Inspired Neural Learning of Collective Variables

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The ISOKANN (Invariant Subspaces of Koopman Operators Learned by Artificial Neural Networks) framework provides a data-driven route to extract collective variables (CVs) and effective dynamics from complex molecular systems. In this work, we integrate the theoretical foundation of Koopman operators with Krylov-like subspace algorithms, and reduced dynamical modeling to build a coherent picture of how to describe metastable transitions in high-dimensional systems based on CVs. Starting from the identification of CVs based on dominant invariant subspaces, we derive the corresponding effective dynamics on the latent space and connect these to transition rates and times, committor functions, and transition pathways. The combination of Koopman-based learning and reduced-dimensional effective dynamics yields a principled framework for computing transition rates and pathways from simulation data. Numerical experiments on one-, two-, and three-dimensional benchmark potentials illustrate the ability of ISOKANN to reconstruct the coarse-grained kinetics and reproduce transition times across enthalpic and entropic barriers.



Coarse-Grained Boltzmann Generators

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Sampling equilibrium molecular configurations from the Boltzmann distribution is a longstanding challenge. Boltzmann Generators (BGs) address this by combining exact-likelihood generative models with importance sampling, but their practical scalability is limited. Meanwhile, coarse-grained surrogates enable the modeling of larger systems by reducing effective dimensionality, yet often lack the reweighting process required to ensure asymptotically correct statistics. In this work, we propose Coarse-Grained Boltzmann Generators (CG-BGs), a principled framework that unifies scalable reduced-order modeling with the exactness of importance sampling. CG-BGs act in a coarse-grained coordinate space, using a learned potential of mean force (PMF) to reweight samples generated by a flow-based model. Crucially, we show that this PMF can be efficiently learned from rapidly converged data via force matching. Our results demonstrate that CG-BGs faithfully capture complex interactions mediated by explicit solvent within highly reduced representations, establishing a scalable pathway for the unbiased sampling of larger molecular systems.


Timewarp: Transferable Acceleration of Molecular Dynamics by Learning Time-Coarsened Dynamics

Neural Information Processing Systems

MD is often used to compute equilibrium properties, which requires sampling from an equilibrium distribution such as the Boltzmann distribution. However, many important processes, such as binding and folding, occur over timescales of milliseconds or beyond, and cannot be efficiently sampled with conventional MD.Furthermore, new MD simulations need to be performed for each molecular system studied.We present *Timewarp*, an enhanced sampling method which uses a normalising flow as a proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo method targeting the Boltzmann distribution. The flow is trained offline on MD trajectories and learns to make large steps in time, simulating the molecular dynamics of $10^{5} - 10^{6} \textrm{fs}$.Crucially, Timewarp is *transferable* between molecular systems: once trained, we show that it generalises to unseen small peptides (2-4 amino acids) at all-atom resolution, exploring their metastable states and providing wall-clock acceleration of sampling compared to standard MD.Our method constitutes an important step towards general, transferable algorithms for accelerating MD.


Implicit Transfer Operator Learning: Multiple Time-Resolution Models for Molecular Dynamics

Neural Information Processing Systems

Computing properties of molecular systems rely on estimating expectations of the (unnormalized) Boltzmann distribution. Molecular dynamics (MD) is a broadly adopted technique to approximate such quantities. However, stable simulations rely on very small integration time-steps ($10^{-15}\,\mathrm{s}$), whereas convergence of some moments, e.g.


JAX MD: A Framework for Differentiable Physics

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce JAX MD, a software package for performing differentiable physics simulations with a focus on molecular dynamics. JAX MD includes a number of statistical physics simulation environments as well as interaction potentials and neural networks that can be integrated into these environments without writing any additional code. Since the simulations themselves are differentiable functions, entire trajectories can be differentiated to perform meta-optimization. These features are built on primitive operations, such as spatial partitioning, that allow simulations to scale to hundreds-of-thousands of particles on a single GPU. These primitives are flexible enough that they can be used to scale up workloads outside of molecular dynamics.


Enhanced Sampling for Efficient Learning of Coarse-Grained Machine Learning Potentials

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Coarse-graining (CG) enables molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of larger systems and longer timescales that are otherwise infeasible with atomistic models. Machine learning potentials (MLPs), with their capacity to capture many-body interactions, can provide accurate approximations of the potential of mean force (PMF) in CG models. Current CG MLPs are typically trained in a bottom-up manner via force matching, which in practice relies on configurations sampled from the unbiased equilibrium Boltzmann distribution to ensure thermodynamic consistency. This convention poses two key limitations: first, sufficiently long atomistic trajectories are needed to reach convergence; and second, even once equilibrated, transition regions remain poorly sampled. To address these issues, we employ enhanced sampling to bias along CG degrees of freedom for data generation, and then recompute the forces with respect to the unbiased potential. This strategy simultaneously shortens the simulation time required to produce equilibrated data and enriches sampling in transition regions, while preserving the correct PMF. We demonstrate its effectiveness on the Müller-Brown potential and capped alanine, achieving notable improvements. Our findings support the use of enhanced sampling for force matching as a promising direction to improve the accuracy and reliability of CG MLPs.