Coarse-Grained Boltzmann Generators
About
Sampling equilibrium molecular configurations from the Boltzmann distribution is a longstanding challenge. Boltzmann Generators (BGs) address this by combining exact-likelihood generative models with importance sampling, but practical scalability is limited. Meanwhile, coarse-grained surrogates enable the modeling of larger systems by reducing effective dimensionality, yet often lack a reweighting procedure required to ensure asymptotically correct statistics. In this work, we propose Coarse-Grained Boltzmann Generators (CG-BGs), a framework for reduced-order generative modeling with importance sampling in coarse-grained coordinate space. CG-BGs generate samples using a flow-based model and reweight them using a learned potential of mean force (PMF). We show that the PMF can be learned from rapidly converged trajectories via enhanced sampling force matching. Experiments demonstrate that CG-BGs capture solvent-mediated interactions in highly reduced representations while substantially reducing computational cost relative to atomistic BGs, providing a practical route toward equilibrium sampling of larger molecular systems.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sample Generation | Alanine dipeptide (test) | Total Time (h)0.84 | 7 | |
| Coarse-grained molecular sampling | Alanine dipeptide Heavy Atom resolution | JS Divergence0.0075 | 5 | |
| Coarse-grained molecular sampling | Alanine dipeptide Core Beta resolution | JS Divergence0.0079 | 4 |