Stochastic Control Policies for Robust Molecular Transition Path Sampling
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.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Stochastic Optimal Control for Collective Variable Free Sampling of Molecular Transition Paths
We consider the problem of sampling transition paths between two given metastable states of a molecular system, e.g. a folded and unfolded protein or products and reactants of a chemical reaction. Due to the existence of…
Dimensionality ReductionUnifying Entropy Regularization in Optimal Control: From and Back to Classical Objectives via Iterated Soft Policies and Path Integral Solutions
This paper develops a unified perspective on several optimal control formulations through the lens of Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization. We propose a central problem that separates the KL penalties on policies and tra…
PINN-MEP: Continuous Neural Representations for Minimum-Energy Path Discovery in Molecular Systems
Characterizing conformational transitions in physical systems remains a fundamental challenge in the computational sciences. Traditional sampling methods like molecular dynamics (MD) or MCMC often struggle with the high-…
Markov State Models of Gene Regulatory Networks
Gene regulatory networks with dynamics characterized by multiple stable states underlie cell fate-decisions. Quantitative models that can link molecular-level knowledge of gene regulation to a global understanding of net…
An Optimal Control Method to Compute the Most Likely Transition Path for Stochastic Dynamical Systems with Jumps
Many complex real world phenomena exhibit abrupt, intermittent or jumping behaviors, which are more suitable to be described by stochastic differential equations under non-Gaussian L\'evy noise. Among these complex pheno…