SE(3)-Stochastic Flow Matching for Protein Backbone Generation
Authors: Joey Bose,Tara Akhound-Sadegh,Guillaume Huguet,Kilian FATRAS,Jarrid Rector-Brooks,Cheng-Hao Liu,Andrei Cristian Nica,Maksym Korablyov,Michael M. Bronstein,Alexander Tong
Presentation: ICLR 2024,Spotlight

Abstract: The computational design of novel protein structures has the potential to impact numerous scientific disciplines greatly. Toward this goal, we introduce \foldflow, a series of novel generative models of increasing modeling power based on the flow-matching paradigm over $3\mathrm{D}$ rigid motions---i.e. the group $\mathrm{SE(3)}$---enabling accurate modeling of protein backbones. We first introduce $\text{FoldFlow-Base}$, a simulation-free approach to learning deterministic continuous-time dynamics and matching invariant target distributions on $\mathrm{SE(3)}$. We next accelerate training by incorporating Riemannian optimal transport to create $\text{FoldFlow-OT}$, leading to the construction of both more simple and stable flows. Finally, we design \foldflowsfm, coupling both Riemannian OT and simulation-free training to learn stochastic continuous-time dynamics over $\mathrm{SE(3)}$. Our family of $\text{FoldFlow}$, generative models offers several key advantages over previous approaches to the generative modeling of proteins: they are more stable and faster to train than diffusion-based approaches, and our models enjoy the ability to map any invariant source distribution to any invariant target distribution over $\mathrm{SE(3)}$. Empirically, we validate $\text{FoldFlow}$, on protein backbone generation of up to $300$ amino acids leading to high-quality designable, diverse, and novel samples.