Amortized Sampling with Transferable Normalizing Flows

Efficient equilibrium sampling of molecular conformations remains a core challenge in computational chemistry and statistical inference. Classical approaches such as molecular dynamics or Markov chain Monte Carlo inherently lack amortization; the computational cost of sampling must be paid in-full for each system of interest. The widespread success of generative models has inspired interest into overcoming this limitation through learning sampling algorithms. Despite performing on par with conventional methods when trained on a single system, learned samplers have so far demonstrated limited ability to transfer across systems. We prove that deep learning enables the design of scalable and transferable samplers by introducing Ensemble, a 280 million parameter all-atom transferable normalizing flow trained on a corpus of peptide molecular dynamics trajectories up to 8 residues in length. Ensemble draws zero-shot uncorrelated proposal samples for arbitrary peptide systems, achieving the previously intractable transferability across sequence length, whilst retaining the efficient likelihood evaluation of normalizing flows. Through extensive empirical evaluation we demonstrate the efficacy of Ensemble as a proposal for a variety of sampling algorithms, finding a simple importance sampling-based finetuning procedure to achieve superior performance to established methods such as sequential Monte Carlo. Ensemble opens the door for further research into sampling methods and finetuning objectives.