Towards equilibrium molecular conformation generation with GFlowNets

Abstract

Sampling diverse, thermodynamically feasible molecular conformations plays a crucial role in predicting properties of a molecule. In this paper we propose to use GFlowNets for sampling conformations of small molecules from the Boltzmann distribution, as determined by the molecule's energy. The proposed approach can be used in combination with energy estimation methods of different fidelity and discovers a diverse set of low-energy conformations for drug-like molecules. We demonstrate that GFlowNets can reproduce molecular potential energy surfaces by sampling proportionally to the Boltzmann distribution.