Oral Session
Oral 2D AI for Science: Differential Equations & Molecular Modeling
HALL D1
From Feasible to Practical: Pareto-Optimal Synthesis Planning
Friedrich Hastedt ⋅ Dongda Zhang ⋅ Antonio Del rio chanona
Current computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) methods often treat retrosynthesis as solved once a single feasible route is identified, focusing primarily on convergence or shortest-path metrics. This view is misaligned with real-world practice, where chemists must balance competing objectives such as cost, sustainability, toxicity, and overall yield. To address this, we formulate synthesis planning as a multi-objective search problem and introduce MORetro$^\ast$, an algorithm that generates a Pareto front of synthesis routes to explicitly capture trade-offs between user-defined criteria. MORetro$^\ast$ uses weighted scalarization and solution-informed sampling to efficiently navigate the combinatorial search space and prioritize promising trade-offs. Building on multi-objective A$^\ast$-search, we provide optimality guarantees showing that, for a fixed single-step model, MORetro$^\ast$ recovers the true Pareto front under admissibility. Across multiple retrosynthesis benchmarks, MORetro$^\ast$ produces diverse, high-quality Pareto fronts, uncovering solutions overlooked by single-objective approaches and better aligning CASP outputs with industrial decision-making.
ReViT: Rotational-equivariant Vision Transformers for Neural PDE Solvers
Hao Wei ⋅ Björn List ⋅ Nils Thuerey
Physics obeys strict symmetries like rotational equivariance. However, the standard Transformer architectures widely used in physics foundation models do not enforce these constraints by construction. We introduce ReViT, a rotationally equivariant Vision Transformer framework for neural PDE solvers operating on grid-based physical fields that achieves exact equivariance for the discrete groups $C_4$ (2D) and the chiral octahedral group $O$ (3D), with bounded approximate $\mathrm{SO}(d)$ equivariance for continuous rotations. ReViT maps scalar and vector inputs into locally invariant representations derived from physics-based canonical bases, enabling the use of standard self-attention without symmetry violations. Built on a hierarchical Swin-style backbone with a precomputed reference basis pyramid, ReViT preserves equivariance across multi-scale operations. We evaluate ReViT on a wide range of 2D and 3D PDE benchmarks, such as Magnetohydrodynamics and Turbulent Channel Flows, demonstrating significant gains over state-of-the-art baselines. ReViT exhibits strong generalization, and reduces MSE by up to 65\% compared with the best-performing alternatives.
Rex: A Family of Reversible Exponential (Stochastic) Runge-Kutta Solvers
Zander Blasingame ⋅ Chen Liu
Deep generative models based on neural differential equations have become state-of-the-art for many generation tasks. These models rely on ODE/SDE solvers that integrate from a prior distribution to the data distribution; in many applications it is also highly desirable to integrate in the inverse direction. Standard solvers, however, accumulate discretization errors that prohibit exact inversion, an inaccuracy that is unacceptable in precision-critical applications. Existing inversion methods suffer from poor stability and low order of convergence, and are strictly limited to the ODE setting. In this work, we propose Rex, a family of reversible exponential (stochastic) Runge-Kutta solvers obtained by applying Lawson methods to convert any explicit (stochastic) Runge-Kutta scheme into an algebraically reversible one for both diffusion ODEs and SDEs. Beyond a rigorous theoretical analysis---establishing arbitrary-order convergence and a non-zero region of linear stability---we empirically demonstrate that Rex achieves near-machine-precision reconstruction and improves Boltzmann sampling with flow models as well as image generation and editing with diffusion models.
Towards Sub-Second Molecular Docking as a Structural Primitive: A Quantized Consistency Diffusion Framework
Kexin Zhang ⋅ Weichen Qin ⋅ Yue Teng ⋅ Jiale Yu ⋅ Yuanyuan Ma ⋅ jinyu lin ⋅ Liping Sun ⋅ Jie Zheng ⋅ Jingyi Yu
Agent-centered scientific discovery is turning scientific models into always-on computational infrastructure. In this paradigm, AI agents coordinate tools, interpret feedback, and drive high-frequency research loops, requiring domain models that are both accurate and callable in real time. Molecular docking exposes this bottleneck: it provides essential structural feedback for drug discovery, yet current high-fidelity docking and co-folding models remain limited by iterative generative refinement and heavy computation. We present a compute-efficient co-folding framework that turns molecular docking into a sub-second structural primitive. Because docking methods operate under different levels of structural prior, we report accuracy under information-level-matched protocols, comparing blind settings with blind generative methods and interface-informed settings with surface- or interface-informed baselines. Our framework combines two ideas. First, Progressive Consistency Regularization (PCR) compresses diffusion dynamics into reliable few-step inference through reconstruction-anchored consistency tuning. Second, Residual-Safe Quantization preserves high-fidelity residual streams and geometry-sensitive operations in BF16 while quantizing selected compute-intensive linear transformations. Our model achieves state-of-the-art docking accuracy under the matched interface-informed protocol, reports blind docking performance separately under the matched blind protocol, and generates five conformations for a representative 256-token complex in 0.17 seconds on a single NVIDIA H20 GPU, delivering a $>300\times$ speedup over AlphaFold3 under the benchmarked setting. Together, these results move molecular docking from an offline generative simulator toward a real-time structural primitive for agent-centered drug discovery.