Scaling Transferable Coarse-graining with Mean Force Matching

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Park, Abigail, Chennakesavalu, Shriram, Rotskoff, Grant M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Park, Abigail
Chennakesavalu, Shriram
Rotskoff, Grant M.
author_facet Park, Abigail
Chennakesavalu, Shriram
Rotskoff, Grant M.
contents Coarse-grained molecular dynamics often sacrifices accuracy and transferability for computational efficiency, but the use of machine learned potentials is helping coarse-grained models attain performance on par with atomistic molecular dynamics. Nevertheless, developing representations of the coarse-grained potential energy surface faces severe scaling challenges due to the extreme data demands of widely used "bottom-up" coarse-graining objectives. In this work, we show that mean force matching, a strategy for training thermodynamically consistent coarse-grained models, requires 50x fewer training samples and 87% less total atomistic simulation time, while obtaining better accuracy on the potential of mean force for unseen proteins compared to other commonly used objectives. By systematically removing noise from the objective function, we demonstrate that it is possible to scale machine learning architectures for coarse-graining, enabling highly accurate and transferable models. We show the advantages of mean force matching both theoretically and through exhaustive benchmarking using thermodynamic consistency as the primary metric of accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_14531
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Scaling Transferable Coarse-graining with Mean Force Matching
Park, Abigail
Chennakesavalu, Shriram
Rotskoff, Grant M.
Chemical Physics
Coarse-grained molecular dynamics often sacrifices accuracy and transferability for computational efficiency, but the use of machine learned potentials is helping coarse-grained models attain performance on par with atomistic molecular dynamics. Nevertheless, developing representations of the coarse-grained potential energy surface faces severe scaling challenges due to the extreme data demands of widely used "bottom-up" coarse-graining objectives. In this work, we show that mean force matching, a strategy for training thermodynamically consistent coarse-grained models, requires 50x fewer training samples and 87% less total atomistic simulation time, while obtaining better accuracy on the potential of mean force for unseen proteins compared to other commonly used objectives. By systematically removing noise from the objective function, we demonstrate that it is possible to scale machine learning architectures for coarse-graining, enabling highly accurate and transferable models. We show the advantages of mean force matching both theoretically and through exhaustive benchmarking using thermodynamic consistency as the primary metric of accuracy.
title Scaling Transferable Coarse-graining with Mean Force Matching
topic Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14531