Accelerating the Generation of Molecular Conformations with Progressive Distillation of Equivariant Latent Diffusion Models
This incremental work addresses the need for faster molecular conformation screening in computational biochemistry and drug discovery.
The paper tackled accelerating molecular conformation generation by applying fast sampling methods to an equivariant latent diffusion model, achieving up to 7.5x speed gains with limited degradation in structural stability.
Recent advances in fast sampling methods for diffusion models have demonstrated significant potential to accelerate generation on image modalities. We apply these methods to 3-dimensional molecular conformations by building on the recently introduced GeoLDM equivariant latent diffusion model (Xu et al., 2023). We evaluate trade-offs between speed gains and quality loss, as measured by molecular conformation structural stability. We introduce Equivariant Latent Progressive Distillation, a fast sampling algorithm that preserves geometric equivariance and accelerates generation from latent diffusion models. Our experiments demonstrate up to 7.5x gains in sampling speed with limited degradation in molecular stability. These results suggest this accelerated sampling method has strong potential for high-throughput in silico molecular conformations screening in computational biochemistry, drug discovery, and life sciences applications.