  Recent advances in fast sampling methods for diffusion models have
demonstrated significant potential to accelerate generation on image
modalities. We apply these methods to 3-dimensional molecular conformations by
building on the recently introduced GeoLDM equivariant latent diffusion model
(Xu et al., 2023). We evaluate trade-offs between speed gains and quality loss,
as measured by molecular conformation structural stability. We introduce
Equivariant Latent Progressive Distillation, a fast sampling algorithm that
preserves geometric equivariance and accelerates generation from latent
diffusion models. Our experiments demonstrate up to 7.5x gains in sampling
speed with limited degradation in molecular stability. These results suggest
this accelerated sampling method has strong potential for high-throughput in
silico molecular conformations screening in computational biochemistry, drug
discovery, and life sciences applications.
