Molecular Dynamics

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11 papers in the last 28 days · 0.2% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-21

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Molecular Dynamics.

Period ending 2026-09-07

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Molecular Dynamics.

67 papers

Latest in Molecular Dynamics

Apr 27, 2026physics.chem-ph

Enhancing molecular dynamics with equivariant machine-learned densities

Machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have enabled molecular dynamics at near ab initio accuracy, yet remain limited to energies and forces by construction, leaving electronic observables such as dipole moments and polarizabilities inaccessible. We introduce DenSNet, a density-first approach to machine-learned electronic structure that learns the Hohenberg--Kohn map from nuclear configurations to the ground-state electron density. Our approach employs an SE(3)-equivariant neural network to predict density coefficients of a flexible atom-centered Gaussian basis, combined with a ΔΔ-learning strategy that uses superposed atomic densities as a prior to accelerate training. A second equivariant network then maps the predicted density to the total energy, providing a unified framework for molecular dynamics and electronic structure. We validate DenSNet on ethanol, ethanethiol, and resorcinol, where infrared spectra from machine-learned trajectories show excellent agreement with experimental gas-phase measurements. To test scalability, we train on polythiophene oligomers with 1--6 monomers and extrapolate to chains of up to 12 monomers, generating stable long-time trajectories whose infrared spectra agree with reference density functional theory calculations. Here, we show that reinstating the electron density as the central learned quantity opens a practical route to transferable prediction of spectroscopic and electronic observables in large-scale molecular simulations.
Mihail Bogojeski, Muhammad R. Hasyim, Leslie Vogt-Maranto +3
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Tokenised Flow Matching for Hierarchical Simulation Based Inference

The cost of simulator evaluations is a key practical bottleneck for Simulation Based Inference (SBI). In hierarchical settings with shared global parameters and exchangeable site-level parameters and observations, this structure can be exploited to improve simulation efficiency. Existing hierarchical SBI approaches factorise the posterior yet still simulate across multiple sites per training sample; We instead explore likelihood factorisation (LF) to train from single-site simulations. In LF sampling we learn a per-site neural surrogate of the simulator and then assemble synthetic multi-site observations to amortise inference for the full hierarchical posterior. Building on this, we propose Tokenised Flow Matching for Posterior Estimation (TFMPE), a tokenised flow matching approach that supports function-valued observations through likelihood factorisation. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce a benchmark for hierarchical SBI. We validate TFMPE on this benchmark and on realistic infectious disease and computational fluid dynamics models, finding well-calibrated posteriors while reducing computational cost.
Giovanni Charles, Cosmo Santoni, Seth Flaxman +1
Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Sheaf Neural Networks on SPD Manifolds: Second-Order Geometric Representation Learning

Graph neural networks face two fundamental challenges rooted in the linear structure of Euclidean vector spaces: (1) Current architectures represent geometry through vectors (directions, gradients), yet many tasks require matrix-valued representations that capture relationships between directions-such as how atomic orientations covary in a molecule. These second-order representations are naturally captured by points on the symmetric positive definite matrices (SPD) manifold; (2) Standard message passing applies shared transformations across edges. Sheaf neural networks address this via edge-specific transformations, but existing formulations remain confined to vector spaces and therefore cannot propagate matrix-valued features. We address both challenges by developing the first sheaf neural network operates natively on the SPD manifold. Our key insight is that the SPD manifold admits a Lie group structure, enabling well-posed analogs of sheaf operators without projecting to Euclidean space. Theoretically, we prove that SPD-valued sheaves are strictly more expressive than Euclidean sheaves: they admit consistent configurations (global sections) that vector-valued sheaves cannot represent, directly translating to richer learned representations. Empirically, our sheaf convolution transforms effectively rank-1 directional inputs into full-rank matrices encoding local geometric structure. Our dual-stream architecture achieves SOTA on 6/7 MoleculeNet benchmarks, with the sheaf framework providing consistent depth robustness.
Yuhan Peng, Junwen Dong, Yuzhi Zeng +6
Apr 2, 2026cs.CL

PolyJarvis: An LLM-Orchestrated Agent for Automated All-Atom Molecular Dynamics of Amorphous Homopolymers

All-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can predict polymer properties from molecular structure, yet their execution requires specialized expertise in force field selection, system construction, equilibration, and property extraction. We present PolyJarvis, a platform in which a planning agent produces a validated run plan that deterministic stage scripts execute through established simulation toolkits, Enhanced Monte Carlo (EMC) for system construction and LAMMPS for molecular dynamics, exposed as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, with a recovery agent consulted only on structured failures and within a fixed decision budget. Given a repeat-unit SMILES string and target properties, PolyJarvis constructs the amorphous cell, equilibrates it under a mechanized convergence gate, and computes target properties. Validation is conducted on seven amorphous homopolymers, each run as three replicates that share a protocol frozen per system and use independent random seeds, namely polyethylene (PE), atactic polystyrene (aPS), syndiotactic poly(vinyl chloride) (sPVC), poly(L-lactic acid) (PLLA), poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG), poly(ether ether ketone) (PEEK), and polysulfone (PSU). Against experimental references, 13 of 19 graded comparisons meet the acceptance criteria (density 5 of 7, glass transition 4 of 7, bulk modulus 4 of 5). The failures are concentrated in the PCFF systems: under-density of aPS and PEG, overestimated glass transitions of the stiff PLLA and PEEK backbones, and an overstiff PEG bulk modulus.
Alexander Zhao, Achuth Chandrasekhar, Amir Barati Farimani
Feb 18, 2026stat.ML

Enhanced Diffusion Sampling: Efficient Rare Event Sampling and Free Energy Calculation with Diffusion Models

The rare-event sampling problem has long been the central limiting factor in molecular dynamics (MD), especially in biomolecular simulation. Recently, diffusion models such as BioEmu have emerged as powerful equilibrium samplers that generate independent samples from complex molecular distributions, eliminating the cost of sampling rare transition events. However, a sampling problem remains when computing observables that rely on states which are rare in equilibrium, for example folding free energies. Here, we introduce enhanced diffusion sampling, enabling efficient exploration of rare-event regions while preserving unbiased thermodynamic estimators. The key idea is to perform quantitatively accurate steering protocols to generate biased ensembles and subsequently recover equilibrium statistics via exact reweighting. We instantiate our framework in three algorithms: UmbrellaDiff (umbrella sampling with diffusion models), MetaDiff (a batchwise analogue for metadynamics), and ΔΔG-Diff (free-energy differences via tilted ensembles). Across toy systems, protein folding landscapes and folding free energies, our methods achieve fast, accurate, and scalable estimation of equilibrium properties within GPU-minutes to hours per system-closing the rare-event sampling gap that remained after the advent of diffusion-model equilibrium samplers.
Yu Xie, Ludwig Winkler, Lixin Sun +10
Jan 29, 2026cs.LG

Learning Hamiltonian Flow Maps: Mean Flow Consistency for Large-Timestep Molecular Dynamics

Simulating the long-time evolution of Hamiltonian systems is limited by the small timesteps required for stable numerical integration. To overcome this constraint, we introduce a framework to learn Hamiltonian Flow Maps by predicting the mean phase-space evolution over a chosen time span, enabling stable large-timestep updates far beyond the stability limits of classical integrators. To this end, we impose a Mean Flow consistency condition for time-averaged Hamiltonian dynamics. Unlike prior approaches, this allows training on independent phase-space samples without access to future states, avoiding expensive trajectory generation. Validated across diverse Hamiltonian systems, our method in particular improves upon molecular dynamics simulations using machine-learned force fields (MLFF). Our models maintain comparable training and inference cost, but support significantly larger integration timesteps while trained directly on widely-available trajectory-free MLFF datasets.
Winfried Ripken, Michael Plainer, Gregor Lied +5
Jan 8, 2026cs.AI

A General Neural Backbone for Mixed-Integer Linear Optimization via Dual Attention

Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is a foundational framework for combinatorial optimization across science and engineering, but remains hard to solve at scale due to NP-hardness. Recent learning-based methods typically model MILP instances as variable-constraint bipartite graphs and use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning, yet their locality limits representation power. We propose an attention-driven neural backbone that adopts an element-centric view of variables and constraints, with dual attention performing parallel intra-type self-attention and inter-type cross-attention. Across three representative tasks at the instance, element, and solving-state levels, our model consistently outperforms conventional GNN-based architectures, highlighting attention-based, element-centric modeling as a powerful foundation for learning-enhanced combinatorial optimization.
Peixin Huang, Yaoxin Wu, Yining Ma +3