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The most popular and universally predictive protein simulation models employ all-atom molecular dynamics (MD), but they come at extreme computational cost. The development of a universal, computationally efficient coarse-grained (CG) model with similar prediction performance has been a long-standing challenge. By combining recent deep learning methods with a large and diverse training set of all-atom protein simulations, we here develop a bottom-up CG force field with chemical transferability, which can be used for extrapolative molecular dynamics on new sequences not used during model parametrization. We demonstrate that the model successfully predicts folded structures, intermediates, metastable folded and unfolded basins, and the fluctuations of intrinsically disordered proteins while it is several orders of magnitude faster than an all-atom model. This showcases the feasibility of a universal and computationally efficient machine-learned CG model for proteins.

Machine learning plays an important and growing role in molecular simulation. The newest version of the OpenMM molecular dynamics toolkit introduces new features to support the use of machine learning potentials. Arbitrary PyTorch models can be added to a simulation and used to compute forces and energy. A higher-level interface allows users to easily model their molecules of interest with general purpose, pretrained potential functions. A collection of optimized CUDA kernels and custom PyTorch operations greatly improves the speed of simulations. We demonstrate these features on simulations of cyclin-dependent kinase 8 (CDK8) and the green fluorescent protein (GFP) chromophore in water. Taken together, these features make it practical to use machine learning to improve the accuracy of simulations at only a modest increase in cost., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures

Normalizing flows are a class of deep generative models that are especially interesting for modeling probability distributions in physics, where the exact likelihood of flows allows reweighting to known target energy functions and computing unbiased observables. For instance, Boltzmann generators tackle the long-standing sampling problem in statistical physics by training flows to produce equilibrium samples of many-body systems such as small molecules and proteins. To build effective models for such systems, it is crucial to incorporate the symmetries of the target energy into the model, which can be achieved by equivariant continuous normalizing flows (CNFs). However, CNFs can be computationally expensive to train and generate samples from, which has hampered their scalability and practical application. In this paper, we introduce equivariant flow matching, a new training objective for equivariant CNFs that is based on the recently proposed optimal transport flow matching. Equivariant flow matching exploits the physical symmetries of the target energy for efficient, simulation-free training of equivariant CNFs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of flow matching on rotation and permutation invariant many-particle systems and a small molecule, alanine dipeptide, where for the first time we obtain a Boltzmann generator with significant sampling efficiency without relying on tailored internal coordinate featurization. Our results show that the equivariant flow matching objective yields flows with shorter integration paths, improved sampling efficiency, and higher scalability compared to existing methods.

Machine-learned coarse-grained (CG) models have the potential for simulating large molecular complexes beyond what is possible with atomistic molecular dynamics. However, training accurate CG models remains a challenge. A widely used methodology for learning CG force-fields maps forces from all-atom molecular dynamics to the CG representation and matches them with a CG force-field on average. We show that there is flexibility in how to map all-atom forces to the CG representation, and that the most commonly used mapping methods are statistically inefficient and potentially even incorrect in the presence of constraints in the all-atom simulation. We define an optimization statement for force mappings and demonstrate that substantially improved CG force-fields can be learned from the same simulation data when using optimized force maps. The method is demonstrated on the miniproteins Chignolin and Tryptophan Cage and published as open-source code., Comment: 44 pages, 19 figures

We combine replica exchange (parallel tempering) with normalizing flows, a class of deep generative models. These two sampling strategies complement each other, resulting in an efficient strategy for sampling molecular systems characterized by rare events, which we call learned replica exchange (LREX). In LREX, a normalizing flow is trained to map the configurations of the fastest-mixing replica into configurations belonging to the target distribution, allowing direct exchanges between the two without the need to simulate intermediate replicas. This can significantly reduce the computational cost compared to standard replica exchange. The proposed method also offers several advantages with respect to Boltzmann generators that directly use normalizing flows to sample the target distribution. We apply LREX to some prototypical molecular dynamics systems, highlighting the improvements over previous methods.

The dynamics of molecules are governed by rare event transitions between long-lived (metastable) states. To explore these transitions efficiently, many enhanced sampling protocols have been introduced that involve using simulations with biases or changed temperatures. Two established statistically optimal estimators for obtaining unbiased equilibrium properties from such simulations are the multistate Bennett Acceptance Ratio (MBAR) and the transition-based reweighting analysis method (TRAM). Both MBAR and TRAM are solved iteratively and can suffer from long convergence times. Here we introduce stochastic approximators (SA) for both estimators, resulting in SAMBAR and SATRAM, which are shown to converge faster than their deterministic counterparts, without significant accuracy loss. Both methods are demonstrated on different molecular systems.

Coarse-grained (CG) molecular simulations have become a standard tool to study molecular processes on time- and length-scales inaccessible to all-atom simulations. Parameterizing CG force fields to match all-atom simulations has mainly relied on force-matching or relative entropy minimization, which require many samples from costly simulations with all-atom or CG resolutions, respectively. Here we present flow-matching, a new training method for CG force fields that combines the advantages of both methods by leveraging normalizing flows, a generative deep learning method. Flow-matching first trains a normalizing flow to represent the CG probability density, which is equivalent to minimizing the relative entropy without requiring iterative CG simulations. Subsequently, the flow generates samples and forces according to the learned distribution in order to train the desired CG free energy model via force matching. Even without requiring forces from the all-atom simulations, flow-matching outperforms classical force-matching by an order of magnitude in terms of data efficiency, and produces CG models that can capture the folding and unfolding transitions of small proteins.

Normalizing flows are a promising tool for modeling probability distributions in physical systems. While state-of-the-art flows accurately approximate distributions and energies, applications in physics additionally require smooth energies to compute forces and higher-order derivatives. Furthermore, such densities are often defined on non-trivial topologies. A recent example are Boltzmann Generators for generating 3D-structures of peptides and small proteins. These generative models leverage the space of internal coordinates (dihedrals, angles, and bonds), which is a product of hypertori and compact intervals. In this work, we introduce a class of smooth mixture transformations working on both compact intervals and hypertori. Mixture transformations employ root-finding methods to invert them in practice, which has so far prevented bi-directional flow training. To this end, we show that parameter gradients and forces of such inverses can be computed from forward evaluations via the inverse function theorem. We demonstrate two advantages of such smooth flows: they allow training by force matching to simulation data and can be used as potentials in molecular dynamics simulations., Comment: Neural Information Proceessing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021

Boltzmann generators approach the sampling problem in many-body physics by combining a normalizing flow and a statistical reweighting method to generate samples in thermodynamic equilibrium. The equilibrium distribution is usually defined by an energy function and a thermodynamic state. Here we propose temperature-steerable flows (TSF) which are able to generate a family of probability densities parametrized by a choosable temperature parameter. TSFs can be embedded in generalized ensemble sampling frameworks to sample a physical system across multiple thermodynamic states., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2012.00429

The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is an efficient simulation technique for computational fluid mechanics and beyond. It is based on a simple stream-and-collide algorithm on Cartesian grids, which is easily compatible with modern machine learning architectures. While it is becoming increasingly clear that deep learning can provide a decisive stimulus for classical simulation techniques, recent studies have not addressed possible connections between machine learning and LBM. Here, we introduce Lettuce, a PyTorch-based LBM code with a threefold aim. Lettuce enables GPU accelerated calculations with minimal source code, facilitates rapid prototyping of LBM models, and enables integrating LBM simulations with PyTorch's deep learning and automatic differentiation facility. As a proof of concept for combining machine learning with the LBM, a neural collision model is developed, trained on a doubly periodic shear layer and then transferred to a different flow, a decaying turbulence. We also exemplify the added benefit of PyTorch's automatic differentiation framework in flow control and optimization. To this end, the spectrum of a forced isotropic turbulence is maintained without further constraining the velocity field. The source code is freely available from https://github.com/lettucecfd/lettuce.

Accurate modeling of the solvent environment for biological molecules is crucial for computational biology and drug design. A popular approach to achieve long simulation time scales for large system sizes is to incorporate the effect of the solvent in a mean-field fashion with implicit solvent models. However, a challenge with existing implicit solvent models is that they often lack accuracy or certain physical properties compared to explicit solvent models, as the many-body effects of the neglected solvent molecules is difficult to model as a mean field. Here, we leverage machine learning (ML) and multi-scale coarse graining (CG) in order to learn implicit solvent models that can approximate the energetic and thermodynamic properties of a given explicit solvent model with arbitrary accuracy, given enough training data. Following the previous ML--CG models CGnet and CGSchnet, we introduce ISSNet, a graph neural network, to model the implicit solvent potential of mean force. ISSNet can learn from explicit solvent simulation data and be readily applied to MD simulations. We compare the solute conformational distributions under different solvation treatments for two peptide systems. The results indicate that ISSNet models can outperform widely-used generalized Born and surface area models in reproducing the thermodynamics of small protein systems with respect to explicit solvent. The success of this novel method demonstrates the potential benefit of applying machine learning methods in accurate modeling of solvent effects for in silico research and biomedical applications., Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures

Off-lattice Boltzmann methods increase the flexibility and applicability of lattice Boltzmann methods by decoupling the discretizations of time, space, and particle velocities. However, the velocity sets that are mostly used in off-lattice Boltzmann simulations were originally tailored to on-lattice Boltzmann methods. In this contribution, we show how the accuracy and efficiency of weakly and fully compressible semi-Lagrangian off-lattice Boltzmann simulations is increased by velocity sets derived from cubature rules, i.e. multivariate quadratures, which have not been produced by the Gauss-product rule. In particular, simulations of 2D shock-vortex interactions indicate that the cubature-derived degree-nine D2Q19 velocity set is capable to replace the Gauss-product rule-derived D2Q25. Likewise, the degree-five velocity sets D3Q13 and D3Q21, as well as a degree-seven D3V27 velocity set were successfully tested for 3D Taylor-Green vortex flows to challenge and surpass the quality of the customary D3Q27 velocity set. In compressible 3D Taylor-Green vortex flows with Mach numbers Ma={0.5;1.0;1.5;2.0} on-lattice simulations with velocity sets D3Q103 and D3V107 showed only limited stability, while the off-lattice degree-nine D3Q45 velocity set accurately reproduced the kinetic energy provided by literature.

Molecular dynamics simulations provide a mechanistic description of molecules by relying on empirical potentials. The quality and transferability of such potentials can be improved leveraging data-driven models derived with machine learning approaches. Here, we present TorchMD, a framework for molecular simulations with mixed classical and machine learning potentials. All of force computations including bond, angle, dihedral, Lennard-Jones and Coulomb interactions are expressed as PyTorch arrays and operations. Moreover, TorchMD enables learning and simulating neural network potentials. We validate it using standard Amber all-atom simulations, learning an ab-initio potential, performing an end-to-end training and finally learning and simulating a coarse-grained model for protein folding. We believe that TorchMD provides a useful tool-set to support molecular simulations of machine learning potentials. Code and data are freely available at \url{github.com/torchmd}.

Turbulent compressible flows are traditionally simulated using explicit time integrators applied to discretized versions of the Navier-Stokes equations. However, the associated Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition severely restricts the maximum time step size. Exploiting the Lagrangian nature of the Boltzmann equation's material derivative, we now introduce a feasible three-dimensional semi-Lagrangian lattice Boltzmann method (SLLBM), which circumvents this restriction. While many lattice Boltzmann methods for compressible flows were restricted to two dimensions due to the enormous number of discrete velocities in three dimensions, the SLLBM uses only 45 discrete velocities. Based on compressible Taylor-Green vortex simulations we show that the new method accurately captures shocks or shocklets as well as turbulence in 3D without utilizing additional filtering or stabilizing techniques, even when the time step sizes are up to two orders of magnitude larger compared to simulations in the literature. Our new method therefore enables researchers for the first time to study compressible turbulent flows by a fully explicit scheme, whose range of admissible time step sizes is only dictated by physics, while being decoupled from the spatial discretization.

Cell type-specific gene expression patterns are represented as memory states of a Hopfield neural network model. It is shown that order parameters of this model can be interpreted as concentrations of master transcription regulators that form concurrent positive feedback loops with a large number of downstream regulated genes. The order parameter free energy then defines an epigenetic landscape in which local minima correspond to stable cell states. The model is applied to gene expression data in the context of hematopoiesis., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures