English

Coarse-Grained Boltzmann Generators

Machine Learning 2026-05-29 v2 Statistical Mechanics Chemical Physics Machine Learning

Abstract

Sampling equilibrium molecular configurations from the Boltzmann distribution is a longstanding challenge. Boltzmann Generators (BGs) address this by combining exact-likelihood generative models with importance sampling, but practical scalability is limited. Meanwhile, coarse-grained surrogates enable the modeling of larger systems by reducing effective dimensionality, yet often lack a reweighting procedure required to ensure asymptotically correct statistics. In this work, we propose Coarse-Grained Boltzmann Generators (CG-BGs), a framework for reduced-order generative modeling with importance sampling in coarse-grained coordinate space. CG-BGs generate samples using a flow-based model and reweight them using a learned potential of mean force (PMF). We show that the PMF can be learned from rapidly converged trajectories via enhanced sampling force matching. Experiments demonstrate that CG-BGs capture solvent-mediated interactions in highly reduced representations while substantially reducing computational cost relative to atomistic BGs, providing a practical route toward equilibrium sampling of larger molecular systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.10637,
  title  = {Coarse-Grained Boltzmann Generators},
  author = {Weilong Chen and Bojun Zhao and Jan Eckwert and Julija Zavadlav},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.10637},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at ICML 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:31:30.872Z