# Pre-training of Molecular GNNs via Conditional Boltzmann Generator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13110 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13110/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [MoleculeNet: A Benchmark for Molecular Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00564/) (2017)
- [Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12265/) (2019)
- [Automatic chemical design using a data-driven continuous representation of molecules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02415/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Networks on Graphs for Learning Molecular Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.09292/) (2015)
- [SE(3)-Transformers: 3D Roto-Translation Equivariant Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10503/) (2020)
- [GeoDiff: a Geometric Diffusion Model for Molecular Conformation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02923/) (2022)
- [Pre-training Molecular Graph Representation with 3D Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07728/) (2021)
- [3D Infomax improves GNNs for Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04126/) (2021)
- [Pre-training via Denoising for Molecular Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00133/) (2022)
- [Molecular Geometry Pretraining with SE(3)-Invariant Denoising Distance Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13602/) (2022)
- [Molecular machine learning with conformer ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08452/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning representations of molecular structures using deep learning is a fundamental problem in molecular property prediction tasks. Molecules inherently exist in the real world as three-dimensional structures; furthermore, they are not static but in continuous motion in the 3D Euclidean space, forming a potential energy surface. Therefore, it is desirable to generate multiple conformations in advance and extract molecular representations using a 4D-QSAR model that incorporates multiple conformations. However, this approach is impractical for drug and material discovery tasks because of the computational cost of obtaining multiple conformations. To address this issue, we propose a pre-training method for molecular GNNs using an existing dataset of molecular conformations to generate a latent vector universal to multiple conformations from a 2D molecular graph. Our method, called Boltzmann GNN, is formulated by maximizing the conditional marginal likelihood of a conditional generative model for conformations generation. We show that our model has a better prediction performance for molecular properties than existing pre-training methods using molecular graphs and three-dimensional molecular structures.
