Neural Energy Minimization for Molecular Conformation Optimization
This paper studies an important problem in computational chemistry: predicting a molecule's spatial atom arrangements, or a molecular conformation. We propose a neural energy minimization formulation that casts the prediction problem into an unrolled optimization process, where a neural network is parametrized to learn the gradient fields of a conformational energy landscape. Assuming different forms of the underlying potential energy function, we can not only reinterpret and unify many of the existing models but also derive new variants of SE(3)-equivariant neural networks in a principled manner. In our experiments, these new variants show superior performance in molecular conformation optimization comparing to existing SE(3)-equivariant neural networks. Moreover, our energy minimization formulation is also suitable for molecular conformation generation, where we can generate more diverse and accurate conformers comparing to existing baselines.
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