MolSnap: Snap-Fast Molecular Generation with Latent Variational Mean Flow

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ahamed, Md Atik, Ye, Qiang, Cheng, Qiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ahamed, Md Atik
Ye, Qiang
Cheng, Qiang
author_facet Ahamed, Md Atik
Ye, Qiang
Cheng, Qiang
contents Molecular generation conditioned on textual descriptions is a fundamental task in computational chemistry and drug discovery. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously ensure high-quality, diverse generation and fast inference. In this work, we propose a novel causality-aware framework that addresses these challenges through two key innovations. First, we introduce a Causality-Aware Transformer (CAT) that jointly encodes molecular graph tokens and text instructions while enforcing causal dependencies during generation. Second, we develop a Variational Mean Flow (VMF) framework that generalizes existing flow-based methods by modeling the latent space as a mixture of Gaussians, enhancing expressiveness beyond unimodal priors. VMF enables efficient one-step inference while maintaining strong generation quality and diversity. Extensive experiments on four standard molecular benchmarks demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving higher novelty (up to 74.5\%), diversity (up to 70.3\%), and 100\% validity across all datasets. Moreover, VMF requires only one number of function evaluation (NFE) during conditional generation and up to five NFEs for unconditional generation, offering substantial computational efficiency over diffusion-based methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05411
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MolSnap: Snap-Fast Molecular Generation with Latent Variational Mean Flow
Ahamed, Md Atik
Ye, Qiang
Cheng, Qiang
Machine Learning
Molecular generation conditioned on textual descriptions is a fundamental task in computational chemistry and drug discovery. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously ensure high-quality, diverse generation and fast inference. In this work, we propose a novel causality-aware framework that addresses these challenges through two key innovations. First, we introduce a Causality-Aware Transformer (CAT) that jointly encodes molecular graph tokens and text instructions while enforcing causal dependencies during generation. Second, we develop a Variational Mean Flow (VMF) framework that generalizes existing flow-based methods by modeling the latent space as a mixture of Gaussians, enhancing expressiveness beyond unimodal priors. VMF enables efficient one-step inference while maintaining strong generation quality and diversity. Extensive experiments on four standard molecular benchmarks demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving higher novelty (up to 74.5\%), diversity (up to 70.3\%), and 100\% validity across all datasets. Moreover, VMF requires only one number of function evaluation (NFE) during conditional generation and up to five NFEs for unconditional generation, offering substantial computational efficiency over diffusion-based methods.
title MolSnap: Snap-Fast Molecular Generation with Latent Variational Mean Flow
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05411