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From Prefix to Path: Learning Temporally Consistent Biomolecular Dynamics from Limited Initial Data

Choudhuri, S.; Adhikari, S.; Mondal, J.

2026-03-05 biophysics
10.64898/2026.03.02.709204 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations provide detailed insights into biomolecular motion but are often limited by the prohibitive cost of sampling long-timescale behavior. Here, we present a Transformer-based framework that reconstructs temporally continuous dynamical trajectories from only a small fraction of the initial data, directly targeting time-ordered evolution rather than independent ensemble snapshots. Using three systems spanning distinct dynamical regimes (intrinsically disordered -Synuclein, Cytochrome P450 ligand-binding motion, and a synthetic three-well potential), we show that the model learns both local fluctuations and long-range temporal structure. At inference time, the model generates full trajectories autoregressively from an initial prefix as prompt, capturing metastable transitions, basin-to-basin movements, and system-specific dynamical signatures. Free-energy surfaces computed from generated trajectories closely match ground-truth landscapes and, in several cases, we observe enhanced sampling in generated trajectories relative to the trained trajectories--while preserving kinetically meaningful transition patterns. These results demon-strate that Transformer architectures can serve as efficient, system-agnostic tools for time-continuous molecular trajectory prediction, offering a data-driven complement to long MD simulations and enabling accelerated exploration of conformational space.

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