DCFold: Efficient Protein Structure Generation with Single Forward Pass
Zhe Zhang, Yuanning Feng, Yuxuan Song, Keyue Qiu, Hao Zhou, Wei-Ying Ma
Abstract
AlphaFold3 introduces a diffusion-based architecture that elevates protein structure prediction to all-atom resolution with improved accuracy. This state-of-the-art performance has established AlphaFold3 as a foundation model for diverse generation and design tasks. However, its iterative design substantially increases inference time, limiting practical deployment in downstream settings such as virtual screening and protein design. We propose DCFold, a single-step generative model that attains AlphaFold3-level accuracy. Our Dual Consistency training framework, which incorporates a novel Temporal Geodesic Matching (TGM) scheduler, enables DCFold to achieve a 15× acceleration in inference while maintaining predictive fidelity. We validate its effectiveness across both structure prediction and binder design benchmarks.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
zhang2026dcfold,
title={{DCF}old: Efficient Protein Structure Generation with Single Forward Pass},
author={Zhe Zhang and Yuanning Feng and Yuxuan Song and Keyue Qiu and Hao Zhou and Wei-Ying Ma},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=LMsdys7t1L}
}