APO: Unsupervised Atomic Policy Optimization for 3D Structure Prediction of Atomic Systems

Abstract:Predicting the 3D structures of atomic systems is fundamental to advancing material science and drug discovery. While flow-matching models (, FlowDPO) have recently shown promise in this domain, their performance relies heavily on alignment with ground-truth coordinates via supervised preference learning. However, obtaining experimental labels for novel crystal phases or de novo proteins is prohibitively expensive, creating a bottleneck for structural modeling in data-scarce regimes. In this work, we propose (Atomic Policy Optimization), a fully unsupervised alignment framework that eliminates the need for ground-truth reference structures. APO adapts group-relative policy optimization to 3D atomic environments, utilizing a novel dual-reward mechanism: (i) a that reinforces the policy's dominant latent structural modes through eigen-decomposition of sample similarities, and (ii) a that enforces thermodynamic stability. Our framework enables the model to ``self-correct'' by identifying physically plausible configurations within sampled groups. Extensive benchmarks on crystal and antibody structure prediction demonstrate that APO consistently outperforms fully supervised baselines, achieving a new state-of-the-art in match rates and structural fidelity. Furthermore, we show that APO effectively straightens probability paths, significantly improving inference efficiency. Our results suggest that intrinsic physical consistency can serve as a superior guide for alignment compared to noisy, supervised coordinate matching.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2607.28553 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2607.28553v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.28553 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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