CARD: Coarse-to-fine Autoregressive Modeling with Radix-based Decomposition for Transferable Free Energy Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yu, Ziyang, He, Yi, Huang, Wenbing, Yan, Wen, Liu, Yang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yu, Ziyang
He, Yi
Huang, Wenbing
Yan, Wen
Liu, Yang
author_facet Yu, Ziyang
He, Yi
Huang, Wenbing
Yan, Wen
Liu, Yang
contents Estimating free energy differences quantifies thermodynamic preferences in molecular interactions, which is central to chemistry and drug discovery. Despite fruitful progress, existing methods still face key limitations: classical computational approaches remain prohibitively expensive due to their reliance on extensive molecular dynamics simulations, while deep learning-based methods are constrained by either less-expressive generative models or input dimensions tied to a specific system, resulting in negligible generalization. To address these challenges, we propose CARD, a generative framework that employs a novel radix-based decomposition to bijectively convert 3D coordinates into mixed discrete-continuous sequences, enabling coarse-to-fine autoregressive modeling with enhanced expressiveness. Notably, the model corresponds to a distribution with zero free energy, serving as a proposal for absolute free energy computation of arbitrary systems without relying on alchemical pathways. Experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that CARD matches the accuracy of classical computational methods on unseen systems with diverse topologies, while achieving an approximately 40-fold speedup in inference.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_02657
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CARD: Coarse-to-fine Autoregressive Modeling with Radix-based Decomposition for Transferable Free Energy Estimation
Yu, Ziyang
He, Yi
Huang, Wenbing
Yan, Wen
Liu, Yang
Machine Learning
Estimating free energy differences quantifies thermodynamic preferences in molecular interactions, which is central to chemistry and drug discovery. Despite fruitful progress, existing methods still face key limitations: classical computational approaches remain prohibitively expensive due to their reliance on extensive molecular dynamics simulations, while deep learning-based methods are constrained by either less-expressive generative models or input dimensions tied to a specific system, resulting in negligible generalization. To address these challenges, we propose CARD, a generative framework that employs a novel radix-based decomposition to bijectively convert 3D coordinates into mixed discrete-continuous sequences, enabling coarse-to-fine autoregressive modeling with enhanced expressiveness. Notably, the model corresponds to a distribution with zero free energy, serving as a proposal for absolute free energy computation of arbitrary systems without relying on alchemical pathways. Experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that CARD matches the accuracy of classical computational methods on unseen systems with diverse topologies, while achieving an approximately 40-fold speedup in inference.
title CARD: Coarse-to-fine Autoregressive Modeling with Radix-based Decomposition for Transferable Free Energy Estimation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02657