VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Simon Olsson
dblp:131/5648
· DBLP profile ↗
5ranked-venue papers
0as first author
5since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 5 · 5 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
3 papers |
Generative modeling · 100% | |
| Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
2 papers |
Bioinformatics and computational biology · 67% Computational science and engineering · 33% |
Topics — the 7 heaviest of 8, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Generative modeling
diffusion model |
1.1 | 2 | 2025 | Boltzmann priors for Implicit Transfer Operators · ICLR 2025 Implicit Transfer Operator Learning: Multiple Time-Resolution Models for Molecular Dynamics · NeurIPS 2023 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling › diffusion model › controllable generation
compositional generation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Compositional Flows for 3D Molecule and Synthesis Pathway Co-design · ICML 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
flow matching |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Compositional Flows for 3D Molecule and Synthesis Pathway Co-design · ICML 2025 |
Bioinformatics and computational biology › drug discovery
drug design |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Compositional Flows for 3D Molecule and Synthesis Pathway Co-design · ICML 2025 |
Computational science and engineering › computational chemistry › molecular simulation
molecular dynamics |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Boltzmann priors for Implicit Transfer Operators · ICLR 2025 |
Bioinformatics and computational biology › molecular informatics › cheminformatics › molecule generation
synthesizable molecule design |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Compositional Flows for 3D Molecule and Synthesis Pathway Co-design · ICML 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
generative flow networks |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | Compositional Flows for 3D Molecule and Synthesis Pathway Co-design · ICML 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
reward-guided sampling · 1.7implicit transfer operator · 1.7generative flow networks · 1.7flow matching · 1.7boltzmann prior · 1.7denoising diffusion probabilistic model · 0.7SE(3) equivariant architecture · 0.7
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | SemlaFlow - Efficient 3D Molecular Generation with Latent Attention and Equivariant Flow MatchingabstractMethods for jointly generating molecular graphs along with their 3D conformations have gained prominence recently due to their potential impact on structure-based drug design. Current approaches, however, often suffer from very slow sampling times or generate molecules with poor chemical validity. Addressing these limitations, we propose Semla, a scalable E(3)-equivariant message passing architecture. We further introduce an unconditional 3D molecular generation model, SemlaFlow, which is trained using equivariant flow matching to generate a joint distribution over atom types, coordinates, bond types and formal charges. Our model produces state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets with as few as 20 sampling steps, corresponding to a two order-of-magnitude speedup compared to state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we highlight limitations of current evaluation methods for 3D generation and propose new benchmark metrics for unconditional molecular generators. Finally, using these new metrics, we compare our model’s ability to generate high quality samples against current approaches and further demonstrate SemlaFlow’s strong performance. Ross Irwin, Alessandro Tibo, Jon Paul Janet, Simon Olsson |
AISTATS | 4 |
| 2025 | Boltzmann priors for Implicit Transfer OperatorsabstractAccurate prediction of thermodynamic properties is essential in drug discovery and materials science. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations provide a principled approach to this task, yet they typically rely on prohibitively long sequential simulations. Implicit Transfer Operator (ITO) Learning offers a promising approach to address this limitation by enabling stable simulation with time steps orders of magnitude larger than MD. However, to train ITOs, we need extensive, unbiased MD data, limiting the scope of this framework. Here, we introduce Boltzmann Priors for ITO (BoPITO) to enhance ITO learning in two ways. First, BoPITO enables more efficient data generation, and second, it embeds inductive biases for long-term dynamical behavior, simultaneously improving sample efficiency by one order of magnitude and guaranteeing asymptotically unbiased equilibrium statistics. Furthermore, we showcase the use of BoPITO in a new tunable sampling protocol interpolating between ITOs trained on off-equilibrium simulations and an equilibrium model by incorporating unbiased correlation functions. Code is available at https://github.com/olsson-group/bopito. Juan Viguera Diez, Mathias Schreiner, Ola Engkvist, Simon Olsson |
ICLR | 4 |
| 2025 | Compositional Flows for 3D Molecule and Synthesis Pathway Co-designabstractMany generative applications, such as synthesis-based 3D molecular design, involve constructing compositional objects with continuous features.
Here, we introduce Compositional Generative Flows (CGFlow), a novel framework that extends flow matching to generate objects in compositional steps while modeling continuous states.
Our key insight is that modeling compositional state transitions can be formulated as a straightforward extension of the flow matching interpolation process.
We further build upon the theoretical foundations of generative flow networks (GFlowNets), enabling reward-guided sampling of compositional structures.
We apply CGFlow to synthesizable drug design by jointly designing the molecule's synthetic pathway with its 3D binding pose.
Our approach achieves state-of-the-art binding affinity and synthesizability on all 15 targets from the LIT-PCBA benchmark, and 4.2x improvement in sampling efficiency compared to 2D synthesis-based baseline.
To our best knowledge, our method is also the first to achieve state of-art-performance in both Vina Dock (-9.42) and AiZynth success rate (36.1\%) on the CrossDocked2020 benchmark. Tony Shen, Seonghwan Seo, Ross Irwin, Kieran Didi, Simon Olsson, Woo Youn Kim, Martin Ester |
ICML | 5 |
| 2025 | HollowFlow: Efficient Sample Likelihood Evaluation using Hollow Message PassingabstractFlow and diffusion-based models have emerged as powerful tools for scientific applications, particularly for sampling non-normalized probability distributions, as exemplified by Boltzmann Generators (BGs). A critical challenge in deploying these models is their reliance on sample likelihood computations, which scale prohibitively with system size $n$, often rendering them infeasible for large-scale problems. To address this, we introduce $\textit{HollowFlow}$, a flow-based generative model leveraging a novel non-backtracking graph neural network (NoBGNN). By enforcing a block-diagonal Jacobian structure, HollowFlow likelihoods are evaluated with a constant number of backward passes in $n$, yielding speed-ups of up to $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$: a significant step towards scaling BGs to larger systems. Crucially, our framework generalizes: $\textbf{any equivariant GNN or attention-based architecture}$ can be adapted into a NoBGNN. We validate HollowFlow by training BGs on two different systems of increasing size. For both systems, the sampling and likelihood evaluation time decreases dramatically, following our theoretical scaling laws. For the larger system we obtain a $10^2\times$ speed-up, clearly illustrating the potential of HollowFlow-based approaches for high-dimensional scientific problems previously hindered by computational bottlenecks. Johann Flemming Gloy, Simon Olsson |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2023 | Implicit Transfer Operator Learning: Multiple Time-Resolution Models for Molecular DynamicsabstractComputing properties of molecular systems rely on estimating expectations of the (unnormalized) Boltzmann distribution. Molecular dynamics (MD) is a broadly adopted technique to approximate such quantities. However, stable simulations rely on very small integration time-steps ($10^{-15}\,\mathrm{s}$), whereas convergence of some moments, e.g. binding free energy or rates, might rely on sampling processes on time-scales as long as $10^{-1}\, \mathrm{s}$, and these simulations must be repeated for every molecular system independently. Here, we present Implicit Transfer Operator (ITO) Learning, a framework to learn surrogates of the simulation process with multiple time-resolutions. We implement ITO with denoising diffusion probabilistic models with a new SE(3) equivariant architecture and show the resulting models can generate self-consistent stochastic dynamics across multiple time-scales, even when the system is only partially observed. Finally, we present a coarse-grained CG-SE3-ITO model which can quantitatively model all-atom molecular dynamics using only coarse molecular representations. As such, ITO provides an important step towards multiple time- and space-resolution acceleration of MD. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/olsson-group/ito}{https://github.com/olsson-group/ito}. Mathias Schreiner, Ole Winther, Simon Olsson |
NeurIPS | 3 |