arXiv Machine Learning By Xinyu Wang, Jinbo Bi, Minghu Song

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

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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.

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