ReQFlow: Rectified Quaternion Flow for Efficient and High-Quality Protein Backbone Generation

Protein backbone generation plays a central role in de novo protein design and is significant for many biological and medical applications. Although diffusion and flow-based generative models provide potential solutions to this challenging task, they often generate proteins with undesired designability and suffer computational inefficiency. In this study, we propose a novel rectified quaternion flow (ReQFlow) matching method for fast and high-quality protein backbone generation. In particular, our method generates a local translation and a 3D rotation from random noise for each residue in a protein chain, which represents each 3D rotation as a unit quaternion and constructs its flow by spherical linear interpolation (SLERP) in an exponential format. We train the model by quaternion flow (QFlow) matching with guaranteed numerical stability and rectify the QFlow model to accelerate its inference and improve the designability of generated protein backbones, leading to the proposed ReQFlow model. Experiments show that ReQFlow achieves on-par performance in protein backbone generation while requiring much fewer sampling steps and significantly less inference time (e.g., being 37x faster than RFDiffusion and 63x faster than Genie2 when generating a backbone of length 300), demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/AngxiaoYue/ReQFlow.