Oct 2025· Nature Computational Science· Vol 5, pp. 1017 - 1028· 4 citations· 58 references
Computer ScienceMedicine
TL;DR
This study presents ECloudGen, which uses latent diffusion to generate electron clouds from protein pockets and decodes them into molecules, and adopts two-stage training, which expands the chemical space accessible to generative drug design.
Mol-CADiff is introduced, a diffusion-based framework that uses causal attention mechanisms for text-conditional molecular generation and enhances dependency modeling both within and across modalities, enabling precise control over the generation process.
Generative models are emerging as a key technology for accelerating molecular discovery in drug design, materials science, and catalysis by enabling efficient exploration of the vast chemical space of possible molecules. Recent advances in deep generative modeling—including variational autoencoders (VAEs), diffusion models, flow matching methods, and autoregressive transformer-based approaches—have produced a diverse toolkit for generating molecular structures and optimizing their properties. However, these paradigms are often studied independently, leaving many machine learning researchers without a clear understanding of their connections, strengths, and limitations in molecular applications. This tutorial provides a unified introduction to modern generative modeling approaches for molecular generation, covering their theoretical foundations, algorithmic design, and practical considerations for molecular representations such as 1D SMILES strings, 2D molecular graphs, and 3D structures. While the tutorial primarily focuses on generative models for de novo molecular design, we also briefly discuss how similar modeling paradigms extend to reaction prediction and retrosynthesis. By presenting these models within a common framework, the tutorial aims to equip ML researchers and AI-for-science practitioners with a clear conceptual map of the generative modeling landscape for molecular discovery and identify emerging research opportunities in this rapidly evolving area.
Kehan Guo, Yili Shen, Jeeyhun Hwang et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
A clear pattern is revealed in LLM spatial capabilities: while they still lag behind state-of-the-art approaches, they are promising and can handle multiple spatial constraints simultaneously, enabling scaling to heterogeneous setups.
Thomas MacDougall, Maksim Kuznetsov, Roman Schutski et al.· arXiv.org· 1 citation
MARD-Mol is proposed, a hybrid AR-diffusion framework based on motif-inspired units that reformulate property optimization into an iterative “diagnose-and-repair” process, enabling targeted optimization of defective motifs while preserving the global scaffold.
Sizhe Zhang, G. Luo, Wei Fan et al.· Bioinform.· 0 citations
A high-accuracy surrogate predictor based on message-passing neural networks is decoupled from heterogeneous generators, and integrated into a closed-loop strategy of generate, score, select, and regenerate to progressively enrich high-performing candidates without modifying the underlying model architectures.
Zhaosheng Zhang, Yanbo Liu, Jiadong Liu et al.· Physical Chemistry, Chemical...· 0 citations
Scoring biomolecular complexes is central to structure assessment and drug discovery, yet the complexes themselves vary widely in pose, size, and molecular composition. A scoring function tuned for one interaction type rarely carries over to another, and most existing methods compound the problem by leaning heavily on task-specific labels. We introduce OmniScore, a universal structure-based framework that learns a shared geometry-aware representation of complexes once and then adapts it to downstream scoring through lightweight task-specific heads. OmniScore couples a graph view and a sequence view of each structure, encodes its three-dimensional geometry, and compresses representations into a compact latent space that a reconstruction module and prediction heads can reuse. We pretrain this backbone on diverse datasets including complexes, monomers, and small molecules with complementary objectives: coordinate recovery, correcting corrupted input tokens, predicting molecular identity, and grounding the representation in structure-level physical quantities. Across the evaluated benchmarks, OmniScore gave the best antibody-antigen and nanobody-antigen quality assessment on all reported metrics compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Its frozen residue embeddings matched the state-of-the-art protein-tokenization method with an average functional-site accuracy of 71.8% on a standard residue-level benchmark. On protein-ligand scoring and ranking benchmarks, it performed on par with methods built specifically for that single task. These results suggest that geometry-aware pretraining can provide a reusable scoring backbone for tasks that depend on interfacial and residue-level structure, within the evaluated settings.
Computer-use AI agents struggle with multi-step workflows like email and customer support. Echoverse trains agents in realistic environments rather than simply providing more training tasks, helping them improve as the tasks, tests, and environments evolve. The post Echoverse: Deep, evolving environments for computer-use agents appeared first on Microsoft Research.