用随机策略提升分子过渡路径采样的稳定性与成功率。
Stochastic Control Policies for Robust Molecular Transition Path Sampling

- 将控制策略建模为路径空间的随机分布,通过高斯或潜在变量生成力场。
- 在3个生物分子系统上,随机策略成功率显著高于确定性基线。
- 大幅降低对初始种子的依赖,适合需要高鲁棒性的分子动力学研究。
过渡路径采样(TPS)旨在高效生成分子在亚稳态间罕见的过渡轨迹,对理解生物分子机制至关重要。除传统基于分子动力学(MD)的采样外,机器学习已成为先进TPS的核心。一类主流方法在显式MD回溯中学习控制力。这些方法保持了底层分子动力学特性,生成的轨迹比直接基于端点条件生成器更符合物理规律。然而,回溯式控制方法常表现出性能不稳定且高度依赖初始种子。本文将回溯式控制重新建模为学习路径空间提议分布,并探究随机性放置作为提升探索与优化鲁棒性的设计选择。提出两种随机策略:FS-TPS直接参数化状态相关的高斯分布输出控制力;LaS-TPS采样紧凑潜在控制变量并解码为具有跨原子相关性的结构化力变化。在三个尺寸递增的生物分子系统——丙氨酸二肽、Chignolin和快速折叠蛋白BBL上进行多种子实验。结果表明,随机策略在所有系统上均显著提升过渡成功率与路径质量,同时大幅降低对随机初始化的敏感性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Transition path sampling (TPS) aims to efficiently generate rare molecular transition trajectories between metastable states and is essential for understanding biomolecular mechanisms. Beyond traditional molecular dynamics (MD)-based sampling, machine learning has become central to state-of-the-art TPS. One major class of methods learns control forces during explicit MD rollouts. By preserving the underlying molecular dynamics, these methods tend to produce more physically plausible trajectories than endpoint-conditioned generators that construct paths directly. However, rollout-based control methods have been reported to exhibit unstable and strongly seed-dependent performance. We recast rollout-based control as learning a path-space proposal distribution and investigate stochasticity placement as a design choice for improving exploration and optimization robustness. We develop two stochastic policies: FS-TPS, which directly parameterizes a state-dependent Gaussian distribution over the control policy output, and LaS-TPS, which samples a compact latent control variable and decodes it into structured, cross-atom-correlated force variation. We conduct extensive multi-seed experiments on three biomolecular systems of increasing size: alanine dipeptide, chignolin, and BBL, a fast-folding protein. Stochastic policies consistently improve transition success and path quality over deterministic-policy baselines while substantially reducing sensitivity to random initialization.
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