English

Hierarchy-Guided Topology Latent Flow for Molecular Graph Generation

Machine Learning 2026-03-31 v1 Materials Science Machine Learning

Abstract

Generating chemically valid 3D molecules is hindered by discrete bond topology: small local bond errors can cause global failures (valence violations, disconnections, implausible rings), especially for drug-like molecules with long-range constraints. Many unconditional 3D generators emphasize coordinates and then infer bonds or rely on post-processing, leaving topology feasibility weakly controlled. We propose Hierarchy-Guided Latent Topology Flow (HLTF), a planner-executor model that generates bond graphs with 3D coordinates, using a latent multi-scale plan for global context and a constraint-aware sampler to suppress topology-driven failures. On QM9, HLTF achieves 98.8% atom stability and 92.9% valid-and-unique, improving PoseBusters validity to 94.0% (+0.9 over the strongest reported baseline). On GEOM-DRUGS, HLTF attains 85.5%/85.0% validity/valid-unique-novel without post-processing and 92.2%/91.2% after standardized relaxation, within 0.9 points of the best post-processed baseline. Explicit topology generation also reduces "false-valid" samples that pass RDKit sanitization but fail stricter checks.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.27113,
  title  = {Hierarchy-Guided Topology Latent Flow for Molecular Graph Generation},
  author = {Urvi Awasthi and Alexander Arjun Lobo and Leonid Zhukov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.27113},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

22 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables. Accepted to ICLR 2026 AI4Mat Workshop

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:42:04.077Z