Free Energy Surface Sampling via Reduced Flow Matching

Sampling the free energy surface, namely, the distribution of collective variables (CVs), is a crucial problem in statistical physics, as it underpins a better understanding of chemical reactions and conformational transitions. Traditional methods for free energy surface sampling involve simulation in high-dimensional configuration space and projecting the resulting configurations onto the CV space.

To reduce the computational costs of such sampling, we propose FES-FM, a reduced flow matching (FM) method for free energy sampling (FES). We train a dynamical transport map in the CV space, thereby enabling direct sampling of the free energy surface.

For many-particle systems, we construct a prior distribution based on the Hessian at a local minimum of the potential, which ensures both rotation-translation invariance and physically meaningful configurations. We evaluate the proposed method across a variety of potential functions and collective variables.

Comparative experiments demonstrate that our approach drastically reduces computational costs while delivering superior accuracy per unit sampling time.