AdsorbFlow: energy-conditioned flow matching enables fast and realistic adsorbate placement

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Qiu, Jiangjie, Li, Wentao, Chen, Honghao, Zhao, Leyi, Wang, Xiaonan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Qiu, Jiangjie
Li, Wentao
Chen, Honghao
Zhao, Leyi
Wang, Xiaonan
author_facet Qiu, Jiangjie
Li, Wentao
Chen, Honghao
Zhao, Leyi
Wang, Xiaonan
contents Identifying low-energy adsorption geometries on catalytic surfaces is a practical bottleneck for computational heterogeneous catalysis: the difficulty lies not only in the cost of density functional theory (DFT) but in proposing initial placements that relax into the correct energy basins. Conditional denoising diffusion has improved success rates, yet requires $\sim$100 iterative steps per sample. Here we introduce AdsorbFlow, a deterministic generative model that learns an energy-conditioned vector field on the rigid-body configuration space of adsorbate translation and rotation via conditional flow matching. Energy information enters through classifier-free guidance conditioning -- not energy-gradient guidance -- and sampling reduces to integrating an ODE in as few as 5 steps. On OC20-Dense with full DFT single-point verification, AdsorbFlow with an EquiformerV2 backbone achieves 61.4% SR@10 and 34.1% SR@1 -- surpassing AdsorbDiff (31.8% SR@1, 41.0% SR@10) at every evaluation level and AdsorbML (47.7% SR@10) -- while using 20 times fewer generative steps and achieving the lowest anomaly rate among generative methods (6.8%). On 50 out-of-distribution systems, AdsorbFlow retains 58.0% SR@10 with a MLFF-to-DFT gap of only 4~percentage points. These results establish that deterministic transport is both faster and more accurate than stochastic denoising for adsorbate placement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19289
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AdsorbFlow: energy-conditioned flow matching enables fast and realistic adsorbate placement
Qiu, Jiangjie
Li, Wentao
Chen, Honghao
Zhao, Leyi
Wang, Xiaonan
Machine Learning
Identifying low-energy adsorption geometries on catalytic surfaces is a practical bottleneck for computational heterogeneous catalysis: the difficulty lies not only in the cost of density functional theory (DFT) but in proposing initial placements that relax into the correct energy basins. Conditional denoising diffusion has improved success rates, yet requires $\sim$100 iterative steps per sample. Here we introduce AdsorbFlow, a deterministic generative model that learns an energy-conditioned vector field on the rigid-body configuration space of adsorbate translation and rotation via conditional flow matching. Energy information enters through classifier-free guidance conditioning -- not energy-gradient guidance -- and sampling reduces to integrating an ODE in as few as 5 steps. On OC20-Dense with full DFT single-point verification, AdsorbFlow with an EquiformerV2 backbone achieves 61.4% SR@10 and 34.1% SR@1 -- surpassing AdsorbDiff (31.8% SR@1, 41.0% SR@10) at every evaluation level and AdsorbML (47.7% SR@10) -- while using 20 times fewer generative steps and achieving the lowest anomaly rate among generative methods (6.8%). On 50 out-of-distribution systems, AdsorbFlow retains 58.0% SR@10 with a MLFF-to-DFT gap of only 4~percentage points. These results establish that deterministic transport is both faster and more accurate than stochastic denoising for adsorbate placement.
title AdsorbFlow: energy-conditioned flow matching enables fast and realistic adsorbate placement
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19289