Papers › DiffDock: Diffusion Steps, Twists, and Turns for Molecular Docking

DiffDock: Diffusion Steps, Twists, and Turns for Molecular Docking

4 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.01776archive 2025-07-28

Gabriele Corso, Hannes Stärk, Bowen Jing, Regina Barzilay, Tommi Jaakkola

Predicting the binding structure of a small molecule ligand to a protein -- a task known as molecular docking -- is critical to drug design. Recent deep learning methods that treat docking as a regression problem have decreased runtime compared to traditional search-based methods but have yet to offer substantial improvements in accuracy. We instead frame molecular docking as a generative modeling problem and develop DiffDock, a diffusion generative model over the non-Euclidean manifold of ligand poses. To do so, we map this manifold to the product space of the degrees of freedom (translational, rotational, and torsional) involved in docking and develop an efficient diffusion process on this space. Empirically, DiffDock obtains a 38% top-1 success rate (RMSD<2A) on PDBBind, significantly outperforming the previous state-of-the-art of traditional docking (23%) and deep learning (20%) methods. Moreover, while previous methods are not able to dock on computationally folded structures (maximum accuracy 10.4%), DiffDock maintains significantly higher precision (21.7%). Finally, DiffDock has fast inference times and provides confidence estimates with high selective accuracy.

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gcorso/diffdock officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
chenruduan/oareactdiff mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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_get_formatter gcorso/diffdock/utils/sampling.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · dd1fc8af16f94740 · report
get_logger gcorso/diffdock/utils/sampling.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · 8b2cbf9f7298d8ad · report
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Tasks

Blind DockingDrug DesignMolecular Docking

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Blind Docking PDBBind DIFFDOCK (40) Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 38.2±1.0 #2 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind DIFFDOCK (40) Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 3.30±0.11 #2 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind DIFFDOCK (10) Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 35.0±1.4 #3 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind DIFFDOCK (10) Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 3.56±0.05 #3 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind EQUIBIND+GNINA Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 28.8 #5 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind GNINA Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 22.9 #7 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind GNINA Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 7.7 #7 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind GLIDE Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 21.8 #8 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind GLIDE Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 9.3 #8 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind QVINAW Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 20.9 #9 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind P2RANK+SMINA Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 20.4 #10 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind P2RANK+SMINA Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 6.9 #10 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind SMINA Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 18.7 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind SMINA Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 7.1 #11 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind TANKBIND Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 4.0 #13 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBBind P2RANK+GNINA Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 5.5 #14 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBbind P2RANK+SMINA Top-1 RMSD (%<2) 20.4 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBbind EQUIBIND+GNINA Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 4.9 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Blind Docking PDBbind GNINA Top-1 RMSD (Med.) 7.7 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Diffusion

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