Papers for

biomolecular modelers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

OctMole generates 3D molecules precisely from coarse to fine scales

OctMole: Multiscale 3D Molecular Generation with Hierarchical Spatial Flows

Abstract: Generating accurate 3D molecules requires jointly determining a variable number of atoms, their identities, and geometry across spatial scales: global shape emerges coarsely, whereas chemical bonds demand fine local precision. Existing atom-based diffusion and flow models operate largely at a single scale, while dense spatial fields become costly at high resolution. We introduce OctMole, a multiscale octree flow framework for 3D molecular generation. A hierarchical occupancy flow progressively resolves sparse molecular support from coarse to fine, and a joint atom flow assigns atom types and continuous in-cell offsets to occupied leaves. This decomposition combines efficient global structure with subcell geometric precision, while cell corruption improves robustness to generated support. On QM9 and GEOM-DRUG, OctMole achieves strong chemical, distributional, and geometric quality, with particularly clear gains over Uni-3DAR on GEOM-DRUG and substantial efficiency gains over dense 3D generation. As an additional capability, intermediate occupancy states and selected regions provide spatial conditioning without task-specific retraining, supporting multiscale shape conditioning, regional editing, linker generation, and shape interpolation. Code and pretrained checkpoints are available at https://github.com/octree-nn/octmole and https://huggingface.co/Disembo/octmole, respectively.

Mon 12 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Making 3D models of molecules is tricky because their overall shape and tiny details like bonds need different levels of focus. The authors created OctMole, a method that builds molecules step-by-step from big shapes down to small atomic details using a special tree-like structure. This approach is faster and more accurate than older methods that look at all atoms equally. OctMole also allows editing parts or blending shapes without extra work.
Open → 2610.16586v1

One step generation improves data models on curved spaces

RW-Flow: One-Step Generation on Compact Manifolds via Wasserstein Gradient Flows

Abstract: Manifold-valued data, and consequently the distributions they induce, are prevalent across many domains, ranging from the locations of geospatial events, such as earthquakes, to biomolecular torsion angles that encode information about three-dimensional structure. While diffusion and flow-based generative models have been successfully extended to compact manifolds, sampling typically requires tens or hundreds of sequential network evaluations. We introduce RW-Flow, a theoretically grounded framework for learning one-step generative models on compact manifolds via Wasserstein gradient flows. The main challenge is identifiability: driving the velocity field to zero should guarantee that the model distribution matches the target distribution. We establish a necessary and sufficient condition for identifiability on compact, connected Riemannian manifolds. We specifically show that, for a symmetric, Lipschitz-continuous cost function, the velocity field induced by the Sinkhorn divergence is identifiable if and only if the associated Gibbs kernel is nondegenerate. This characterization provides a general principle for designing identifiable costs on compact manifolds. It also reveals that the squared geodesic distance, the natural manifold analogue of the squared Euclidean distance, does not always guarantee identifiability. Across benchmarks involving geospatial events, protein side chain torsion angles, RNA backbone torsion angles, and general manifolds discretized as triangular meshes, RW-Flow outperforms existing one-step methods in nearly all settings under fair comparison conditions.

Wed 30 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Many types of important data naturally live on curved shapes called manifolds, like Earth’s surface or molecule shapes. Existing methods to create new examples of such data need many steps, which can be slow. This paper introduces RW-Flow, a method that can generate new data samples in just one step on these curved spaces. The authors explain when this one-step approach can perfectly match the true data, and show their method works well on real examples like earthquake locations and protein shapes.
Open → 2609.39271v1