Equivariant Neural Diffusion for Molecule Generation

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper

Authors

François Cornet, Grigory Bartosh, Mikkel Schmidt, Christian Andersson Naesseth

Abstract

We introduce Equivariant Neural Diffusion (END), a novel diffusion model for molecule generation in 3D that is equivariant to Euclidean transformations. Compared to current state-of-the-art equivariant diffusion models, the key innovation in END lies in its learnable forward process for enhanced generative modelling. Rather than pre-specified, the forward process is parameterized through a time- and data-dependent transformation that is equivariant to rigid transformations. Through a series of experiments on standard molecule generation benchmarks, we demonstrate the competitive performance of END compared to several strong baselines for both unconditional and conditional generation.