publications

2026

1. Preprint

   Learning Hamiltonian Flow Maps: Mean Flow Consistency for Large-Timestep Molecular Dynamics

   Winfried Ripken^*, Michael Plainer^*, Gregor Lied^*, Thorben Frank^*, Oliver T Unke, Stefan Chmiela, Frank Noé, and Klaus-Robert Müller

   arXiv:2601.22123, 2026

   Abs arXiv Code Website

   Simulating the long-time evolution of Hamiltonian systems is limited by the small timesteps required for stable numerical integration. To overcome this constraint, we introduce a framework to learn Hamiltonian Flow Maps by predicting the mean phase-space evolution over a chosen time span, enabling stable large-timestep updates far beyond the stability limits of classical integrators. To this end, we impose a Mean Flow consistency condition for time-averaged Hamiltonian dynamics. Unlike prior approaches, this allows training on independent phase-space samples without access to future states, avoiding expensive trajectory generation. Validated across diverse Hamiltonian systems, our method in particular improves upon molecular dynamics simulations using machine-learned force fields (MLFF). Our models maintain comparable training and inference cost, but support significantly larger integration timesteps while trained directly on widely-available trajectory-free MLFF datasets.

2025

1. NeurIPS

   

   Sampling 3D Molecular Conformers with Diffusion Transformers

   J Thorben Frank^*, Winfried Ripken^*, Gregor Lied^*, Klaus-Robert Müller, Oliver T Unke, and Stefan Chmiela

   In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025

   Abs arXiv Video Code OpenReview Poster

   Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have demonstrated strong performance in generative modeling, particularly in image synthesis, making them a compelling choice for molecular conformer generation. However, applying DiTs to molecules introduces novel challenges, such as integrating discrete molecular graph information with continuous 3D geometry, handling Euclidean symmetries, and designing conditioning mechanisms that generalize across molecules of varying sizes and structures. We propose DiTMC, a framework that adapts DiTs to address these challenges through a modular architecture that separates the processing of 3D coordinates from conditioning on atomic connectivity. To this end, we introduce two complementary graph-based conditioning strategies that integrate seamlessly with the DiT architecture. These are combined with different attention mechanisms, including both standard non-equivariant and SO(3)-equivariant formulations, enabling flexible control over the trade-off between between accuracy and computational efficiency. Experiments on standard conformer generation benchmarks (GEOM-QM9, -DRUGS, -XL) demonstrate that DiTMC achieves state-of-the-art precision and physical validity. Our results highlight how architectural choices and symmetry priors affect sample quality and efficiency, suggesting promising directions for large-scale generative modeling of molecular structures. Code is available at https://github.com/ML4MolSim/dit_mc.