Equivariant Asynchronous Diffusion: An Adaptive Denoising Schedule for Accelerated Molecular Conformation Generation

Abstract: Recent 3D molecular generation methods primarily use asynchronous auto-regressive or synchronous diffusion models. While auto-regressive models build molecules sequentially, they're limited by a short horizon and a discrepancy between training and inference. Conversely, synchronous diffusion models denoise all atoms at once, offering a molecule-level horizon but failing to capture the causal relationships inherent in hierarchical molecular structures. We introduce Equivariant Asynchronous Diffusion (EAD) to overcome these limitations. EAD is a novel diffusion model that combines the strengths of both approaches: it uses an asynchronous denoising schedule to better capture molecular hierarchy while maintaining a molecule-level horizon. Since these relationships are often complex, we propose a dynamic scheduling mechanism to adaptively determine the denoising timestep. Experimental results show that EAD achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D molecular generation.