An End-to-End Framework for Molecular Conformation Generation via Bilevel Programming
Minkai Xu, Wujie Wang, Shitong Luo, Chence Shi, Yoshua Bengio, Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, Jian Tang
Abstract
Predicting molecular conformations (or 3D structures) from molecular graphs is a fundamental problem in many applications. Most existing approaches are usually divided into two steps by first predicting the distances between atoms and then generating a 3D structure through optimizing a distance geometry problem. However, the distances predicted with such two-stage approaches may not be able to consistently preserve the geometry of local atomic neighborhoods, making the generated structures unsatisfying. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution for molecular conformation prediction called ConfVAE based on the conditional variational autoencoder framework. Specifically, the molecular graph is first encoded in a latent space, and then the 3D structures are generated by solving a principled bilevel optimization program. Extensive experiments on several benchmark data sets prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/MinkaiXu/ConfVAE-ICML21}.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v139-xu21f,
title = {An End-to-End Framework for Molecular Conformation Generation via Bilevel Programming},
author = {Xu, Minkai and Wang, Wujie and Luo, Shitong and Shi, Chence and Bengio, Yoshua and Gomez-Bombarelli, Rafael and Tang, Jian},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {11537--11547},
year = {2021},
editor = {Meila, Marina and Zhang, Tong},
volume = {139},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {18--24 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/xu21f/xu21f.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/xu21f.html},
abstract = {Predicting molecular conformations (or 3D structures) from molecular graphs is a fundamental problem in many applications. Most existing approaches are usually divided into two steps by first predicting the distances between atoms and then generating a 3D structure through optimizing a distance geometry problem. However, the distances predicted with such two-stage approaches may not be able to consistently preserve the geometry of local atomic neighborhoods, making the generated structures unsatisfying. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution for molecular conformation prediction called ConfVAE based on the conditional variational autoencoder framework. Specifically, the molecular graph is first encoded in a latent space, and then the 3D structures are generated by solving a principled bilevel optimization program. Extensive experiments on several benchmark data sets prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/MinkaiXu/ConfVAE-ICML21}.}
}