arXiv Machine Learning

Budgeted Quotient-Residual Guidance for Frozen Pocket-Conditioned Molecular Diffusion

Budgeted Quotient-Residual Guidance (QRG) is an inference-time correction that enables quotient-based lead‑optimization objectives—such as distances, contacts, and anchored substructures—to be actively used with frozen pocket‑conditioned molecular diffusion models without retraining. QRG lifts quotient covectors to metric‑horizontal ambient directions and delivers them through a trust budget set by the sampler’s step norm, providing a closed‑form sampler‑budget update and a product‑budget split for section and residual controls. Experiments on frozen TargetDiff backbones show that QRG improves ligand‑generation quality on fragment growing, scaffold hopping, and linker design while preserving novelty and diversity.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

On the Design Space of Discrete Diffusion Online Adaptation for Molecular Optimization

arXiv:2607. 02834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular optimization often starts from a pretrained generative model that captures a broad prior over valid molecular structures.

By Trevor Chen, Ariel Dai, Jason Yang, Riccardo De Santi, Daniel Khalil, Wenda Chu, Nate Gruver, Pranav Murugan, Alexander F. G. Goldberg, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Yisong Yue
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

VGAS: Variance-Reduced Guidance and Adaptive Selection for Training-Free Reward Alignment in Discrete Diffusion

VGAS: Variance-Reduced Guidance and Adaptive Selection for Training-Free Reward Alignment in Discrete Diffusion proposes a new inference-time framework that improves steering of frozen masked discrete diffusion models. By reducing the variance of guidance estimates, applying reward tilting to clean-token logits, and adapting the selection temperature at each step, VGAS addresses three default choices in existing pipelines. Experiments on regulatory DNA, protein, and small-molecule benchmarks show that VGAS achieves the best training-free reward performance and matches or surpasses reward-fine-tuned generators.

By Kwanyoung Kim
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Probe Before You Edit: Probing-Guided Molecular Optimization for LLM Agents in Structure-Based Drug Design

arXiv:2606. 00555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structure-based drug design increasingly employs LLM agents to iteratively refine ligands against a target pocket, yet a viable ligand must satisfy two often-conflicting objectives -- binding affinity and druggability -- which single optimization steps rarely improve together.

By Zaifei Yang, Weiyu Chen, Yaqing Wang, James Kwok
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Leveraging generative hallucination and biophysics-informed modeling for unified biomolecular sequence-structure co-design

The paper introduces MCTH (Monte Carlo Tree Hallucination), an inference-only framework that performs all‑atom biomolecular sequence‑structure co‑design by treating pretrained folding and inverse‑folding models as black‑box operators. MCTH uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to allocate a fixed inference budget across competing design trajectories, incorporating model confidence, uncertainty, and cross‑expert consensus. Experiments across protein‑RNA, protein‑DNA, protein‑protein, and protein‑ligand design show that adaptive search outperforms simpler sampling strategies, and evaluations with AlphaFold3 and Chai‑1 demonstrate transferability beyond the search‑time oracle.

By Xuefeng Liu, Mingxuan Cao, Xiao Luo, Songhao Jiang, Tobin Sosnick, Jinbo Xu, Louis Maher, Rick Stevens
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Few-step Cofolding with All-Atom Flow Maps

arXiv:2606. 08375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: All-atom generative modeling of 3D biomolecular complexes has emerged as the dominant paradigm for predicting the structure of proteins and protein-ligand systems.

By Gianluca Scarpellini, Ron Shprints, Peter Holderrieth, Juno Nam, Pranav Murugan, Rafael G\'omez-Bombarelli, Tommi Jaakola, Maruan Al-Shedivat, Nicholas Matthew Boffi, Avishek Joey Bose
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

PocketVE: Stable and Property-Guided Structure-Based Drug Design with Variance-Exploding Diffusion

PocketVE is a protein-pocket-conditioned variance‑exploding diffusion framework that integrates stable 3D coordinate denoising, classifier‑free property guidance, and adaptive protein perturbation. It improves 3D validity from 58.6% to 80.6% and reduces strain energy from 457.4 to 127.9 on CrossDocked2020 while maintaining competitive docking and property scores. The study shows moderate guidance balances target objectives with geometric quality, and diagnostics confirm enhanced pocket compatibility.

By Peining Zhang, Jinbo Bi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

Q-Steer: Action-Value Guidance for Molecular Policy Optimization

Oracle-limited molecular optimization gives reward only after a complete molecule is generated, while each rollout requires many local next-token decisions. This delayed-feedback interface makes molecular policy optimization myopic: an optimizer can learn that a molecule was good without knowing which intermediate actions made it good.