cs.LGJun 21, 2026

Multigrid Training for Molecular Generation using Graph Neural Networks

Authors: Zixuan LingPaula MercurioDi Liu

Organizations: Department of Mathematics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. · Department of Mathematics, Hamline University, Saint Paul, MN.

Abstract

Deep learning has demonstrated significant success for modeling biochemical molecular systems, where inputs are commonly represented as graphs or 3D grids. A major challenge is that computational cost scales with resolution, making full graph/grid computation of molecular densities expensive and often unstable. We introduce a multigrid training strategy that leverages low-resolution optimization to accelerate learning at higher resolution through parameter transfer across discretizations. For graph molecular representations, we progressively transfer parameters learned from a coarse graph to a sequence of increasingly finer graphs via biased random walk upsampling. For 3D molecular generation, we voxelize the molecular structures at multiple resolutions, pretrain a coarse-resolution conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE), and initialize a fine-resolution CVAE by transferring shape compatible convolutional parameters from the coarse model. Numerical experiments on receptor-conditioned 3D Ligand generation show that multigrid training accelerates convergence and improves generalization compared to training from scratch.

Explore similar work

Oct 11, 2025cs.LG

Transport-Coupled Bayesian Flows for Molecular Graph Generation

Molecular graph generation (MGG) is essentially a multi-class generative task, aimed at predicting categories of atoms and bonds under strict chemical and structural constraints. However, many prevailing diffusion paradigms learn to regress numerical embeddings and rely on a hard discretization rule during sampling to recover discrete labels. This introduces a fundamental discrepancy between training and sampling. While models are trained for point-wise numerical fidelity, the sampling process fundamentally relies on crossing categorical decision boundaries. This discrepancy forces the model to expend efforts on intra-class variations that become irrelevant after discretization, ultimately compromising diversity, structural statistics, and generalization performance. Therefore, we propose TopBF, a unified framework that (i) performs MGG directly in continuous parameter distributions, (ii) learns graph-topological understanding through a Quasi-Wasserstein optimal-transport coupling under geodesic costs, and (iii) supports controllable, property-conditioned generation during sampling without retraining the base model. TopBF innovatively employs cumulative distribution function (CDF) to compute category probabilities induced by the Gaussian channel, thereby unifying the training objective with the sampling discretization operation. Experiments on QM9 and ZINC250k demonstrate superior structural fidelity and efficient generation with improved performance.
Yida Xiong, Jiameng Chen, Kun Li +4
Jul 10, 2026cs.LG

Autoregressive latent diffusion for 3D molecule generation

Three-dimensional (3D) molecule generation has been dominated by diffusion models, which achieve strong generation quality but typically require the molecular size to be specified a priori. Recent autoregressive approaches have substantially narrowed the performance gap while naturally supporting variable-length generation and conditioning on partial molecular context. However, balancing unconditional and context-conditioned generation remains challenging. We introduce KRONOS, a latent autoregressive diffusion framework that generates molecules in the latent space of a pre-trained autoencoder, jointly modeling molecular graph topology and geometry, while retaining the flexibility of autoregressive generation. We further introduce a mixed training strategy inspired by Fill-in-the Middle (FIM) paradigm, enabling both unconditional and fragment-conditioned molecular generation within a single left-to-right autoregressive model. Experiments on QM9 and GEOM-Drugs demonstrate that KRONOS achieves leading unconditional generation performance among autoregressive methods, while remaining competitive with diffusion models. Moreover, fragment-conditioned generation is achieved with negligible impact on unconditional generation performance, demonstrating that both generation paradigms can be supported within a single architecture.
Federico Ottomano, Gaopeng Ren, Yingzhen Li +2
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Unlocking High-Fidelity Molecular Generation from Mass Spectra via Dual-Stream Line Graph Diffusion

De novo molecular generation from tandem mass spectra is a challenging inverse problem whose core difficulty lies in the circular dependency between atom-level and bond-level reasoning: determining a bond's type requires knowing its endpoint atoms' chemical environment, yet an atom's environment is in turn defined by its incident bonds. Existing graph diffusion methods process atoms and bonds within a single computation stream, where atom-bond information synchronization can only occur implicitly across layers. We argue that this single-stream paradigm, rather than the choice of any particular aggregation kernel, is a key architectural bottleneck. We propose DualLGD (Dual-stream Line Graph Diffusion), which reformulates molecular graph denoising as the alternating solution of two coupled subproblems: atom-level reasoning and bond-level reasoning, each operating in its own dedicated representation space. The line graph provides a natural mathematical construction for the bond space, in which bond angles, dihedrals, conjugation chains, and rings correspond to local topological motifs between bonds. Incidence-constrained bidirectional cross-attention synchronizes the two streams at every layer, ensuring that each atom attends only to its incident bonds and vice versa, respecting the fundamental chemical principle that an atom's environment is determined by its bonding context. On the NPLIB1 and MassSpecGym benchmarks, DualLGD achieves top-1 accuracy of 34.37% and 23.89%, approximately 3×3\times the previous state of the art. Ablation studies confirm the architecture as the primary source of improvement: DualLGD without any pre-training already surpasses the previous best fully pretrained model.
Xujun Che, Xiuxia Du, Depeng Xu